Wednesday, August 19, 2009

No writing today

If you write for the reasons I think I do, as a way of contemplating problems - scratching the itch of something you don't understand - there's an inbuilt reason to keep going, no matter how strong your doubts are. There's an internal pressure to go on, not because you think what you produce is going to be worth it, but beacause you need to know something that you can only know by writing it.
- Kate Grenville (Making Stories, 1993. Allen and Unwin, Sydney.)
So does that make 'knowing' writing invalid? Does the reader sense the writer is coming from that angle?
An unidentified friend of Fanny Howe's (The winter sun. 2009. Graywolf Pr.) said:
Poetry is backwards logic. You can't write poetry unless you have knowledge of, or taste for, this 'backwards' way of finding truth.
So it's also about how you want to solve a problem, discover something.
And Fanny herself calls writing
A vocation that has no name.

1 comment:

  1. Love this post. Especially the backwards logic part. Really grok that.

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