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..after he'd moved to London and started the process of becoming himself, he was a bit of a mess. A cupboard rammed full with junk: when he opened the door everything fell out; it took time to reorganize himself. And the blabbing, the telling, was the messiest thing of all: getting control of language was getting control of anger and shame, and it was hard to turn it around, to take the mess of experience and make something coherent out of it.

Only then did you know that you'd got the better of the things that had happened to you: when you controlled the story rather than it controlling you.

For him language was a weapon, a first line of defence - he might not be brave, but he'd certainly answer to bitchy.

The thing is, he said, once you've been picked out, once you've been noticed, you won't ever fit back in your box. You have to walk around naked for the rest of your life, and if there's something of the emperor's new clothes about writing, there are worse ways of hiding your nakedness. Most of them, he added, are terrible for your health, and a lot more expensive

Transit, Rachel Cusk

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Writing was just a way of taking justice into your own hands. If you wanted the proof, all you had to do was look at the people who had something to fear from your honesty.

Transit, Rachel Cusk

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I think it might have something to do with paying attention not to what comes most naturally but to what you find most difficult. We are so schooled, he said, in the doctrine of self-acceptance that the idea of refusing to accept yourself becomes quite radical.

Transit, Rachel Cusk

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The street where we were standing was one of the broad tree-lined avenues of handsome Victorian houses that seemed to act as guarantors of the neighborhood's respectability. Their well-pruned hedges and large, polished front windows, when I passed them, had always caused me groundless feelings of both security and absolute exclusion.

Transit, Rachel Cusk

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Whatever we might wish to believe about ourselves, we are only the result of how others have treated us.

Transit, Rachel Cusk

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Nothing in the world is as horrible as being young. It's okay as a child. If you're lucky there are people to look after you. But from sixteen on it gets harsh. You're really still a child, but everyone just sees you as an adult who is easier to step on than one who is older and more experienced. Nobody wants to protect you anymore. New responsibilities are constantly foisted upon you. Nobody asks you whether you understand the latest thing you are supposed to do.

It really gets bad after marriage. Suddenly you are responsible not only for yourself but for others, and there are always more and more who wish to ride on your back.

In your heart, though, you are still the child you always were and will remain for a long time. If you are lucky you'll be half-mature by the time you get old. Only then are you in a position to be able feel sympathy for those who are young, Until then you begrudge them for what-ever reason.

Baba Dunja's Last Love (page 81)

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Books from BBC four

Running tally of books I've read or added to my list after hearing them read or dramatized on BBC four or BBC four extra. Thank you, BBC!

• The purple hibiscus

• The secret diaries of Adrian Mole aged thirteen and three quarters (Susan Townsend)

• La Belle sauvage (Phillip Pullman)

• Phoebe, Junior (Margaret Oilphant)

Picture: Intersection of Peralta and Hopkins in Berkeley.

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writing advice from francine prose's "reading like a writer"

The warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out—don’t tell us a character  is happy, show us how she screams “yay” and jumps up and down for joy—when in fact the responsibility for showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language.

It’s necessary to hold the concept of clarity as an even higher ideal than grammatical correctness.

It’s a good idea to have a designated section of your bookshelf (perhaps the one nearest your desk) for books by writers who have obviously worked on their  sentences, revising and polishing them into gems that continue to dazzle us. […]  You can open such books anywhere and read a sentence that will move you to labor longer, try harder, to return to that trouble spot and rework that imprecise or awkward sentence until it is something to be proud of instead of something you hope that the reader won’t notice.

In general, I would suggest, the paragraph could be understood as a sort of literary respiration, with each paragraph as an extended—in some cases, very extended—breath. […]  Frequently, each paragraph shift represents a slight change in point of view—[Isaac] Babel’s flash of lightning—or a shift in perspective that we can conceptualize, cinematically, as a change in camera angles.

The advantage of reading widely, as opposed to trying to formulate a series of general rules [about writing], is that we learn there are no general rules, only individual examples to help point you in a direction in which you might want to go.

A one-sentence paragraph feels like a punch, and no one wants to get punched.  Overused, it can be an annoying tic, a lazy writer’s attempt to compel us to pay attention or to inject energy and life into a narrative, of falsely inflating the importance of sentences that our eye might skip over entirely if they were placed, more quietly and modestly, inside a longer paragraph.

Like the one-sentence paragraph, the second-person point of view can also make us suspect that style is being used as a substitute for content.

Omniscient merely means all-knowing, but does not suggest that this all-seeing eye is impartial, objective, or free from prejudices and opinions—which, again, are conveyed through word choice, rhythm, sentence length, diction, and so forth—about whatever that eye is observing.

One mark of bad written dialogue is that it is only doing one thing, at most, at once.

A good writer understands that characters not only speak differently depending on whom they are speaking to, but also listen differently depending on who is speaking.

This notion of dialogue as a pure expression of character that (like character itself) transcends the specifics of time and place may be partly why the conversations in the works of writers such as Austen and Bronte often sound fresh and astonishingly contemporary, and quite unlike the stiff, mannered, archaic speech we find in bad historical novels and in those medieval fantasies in which young men always seem to be saying things like, “Have I passed the solemn and sacred initiation test, venerable hunt master?”

Ranting is another thing that should be done sparingly in literature, as in life, with an eye to why and how long a reader will stay interested in a character who just keeps on talking.

If God is in the details, we all must on some deep level believe that the truth  is in there, too.  Or maybe it is that God is truth: Details are what persuade us that someone is telling the truth—a fact that every liar knows instinctively and too well.

Often, a well-chosen detail can tell us more about a character—his social and economic status, his hopes and dreams, his vision of himself—than a long explanatory passage.

If a gesture is not illuminating, simply leave it out, or try cutting it and see if you later miss it or even remember that it’s gone.  Do we really need that cigarette lit, that glass of wine poured?  Is it merely a way of passing time, of making space in dialogue, of telegraphing mood and emotion?  Does it tell us something specific about the character or the situation we are attempting to recreate on the page?

The wider and deeper your observational range, the better, the more interestingly and truthfully you will write.

Literature is an endless source of courage and confirmation.  The reader and beginning writer can count on being heartened by all the brave and original works that have been written without the slightest regard for how strange or risky they  were, or for what the writer’s mother might have thought when she read them.

While we have always cared about, and sympathized with, fictional characters, the insistence we do so is a relatively new one.

If art demanded Babel’s life, we can certainly handle whatever inconvenience or effort it seems to require from us.

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Don't be frightened. We are all of us breathing in atoms that were once forged in the furnace of a star. There are tiny shards of your life inside them and their life is inside you too. Do you know what they are saying to you?

-Deborah Levy (Black Vodka)

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"Memory is not always reliable. It is not the whole truth. Even I know that."

--Hot milk: Debora Levy

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"I am thinking about the signs on the doors of toilets in public places that tell us who we are. ... Are we all of us lurking in each other's sign?"

Hot milk: Debora Levy

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"Memories, long consigned to the dark reaches of my mind, began to sneak through cracks. Images were tossed up high and dry, picture-perfect, as if a lifetime hadn’t passed between. And, after the first tentative drops, the deluge. Whole conversations, word for word, nuance for nuance; scenes played out as though on film." Read more:

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I thought of you when I read this quote from "Who Was Thomas Alva Edison? (Who Was...?)" by Margaret Frith, John O'Brien, Nancy Harrison - "“The man who doesn’t make up his mind to cultivate the habit of thinking cannot make the most of himself. All progress, all success, springs from thinking.”" Start reading this book for free:

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I thought of you when I read this quote from "The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules: A Novel (League of Pensioners)" by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg - "When the day came for her final moment, she would walk to the grave, crawl into the coffin and put the lid on herself, he was certain of that." Start reading this book for free:

[quoton-blog1]

I thought of you when I read this quote from "The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules: A Novel (League of Pensioners)" by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg - "When the day came for her final moment, she would walk to the grave, crawl into the coffin and put the lid on herself, he was certain of that." Start reading this book for free:

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I thought of you when I read this quote from "The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules: A Novel (League of Pensioners)" by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg - "“‘It is better to dare to cast the dice, than to fade away with a withering flame,’”" Start reading this book for free:

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I thought of you when I read this quote from "The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules: A Novel (League of Pensioners)" by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg - "He wasn’t just an inventor but a good cook too. Since his ex-wife had only made food that was inedible, he had been forced to learn to cook. Then, in time, he had realized that not only was she incompetent in the kitchen but she also saw life itself as one great problem, and so he had divorced her." Start reading this book for free: