Literary quips

I loved reading through Maud Newton’s recent series of literary quips and quotations. I love stuff like that. Commonplace book-ish. There are times when I feel a validating sort of recognition when I read a quote (“Oh! I do that too!”) or I feel a sense of distance and curiosity (“Hm. I don’t know what that one is like.”) – regardless, it’s a feast for the intellect. And something I really am living with now, in the process of my own writing, and revising and working on new things.

I particularly loved this one from Joan Didion:

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions — with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating — but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

Fascinating – and it really illustrates (in a far more eloquent way) what I was getting at in this post about narrative, and how competitive it can be (I have always sensed). I love that it was Joan Didion’s quote. Of course it was.

I have sensed that “secret bully” dynamic from my own experience – because if you are the one writing down “the story” (whatever it may be), then you “lay claim” to it. It becomes yours. And even if other people were part of that original story, then they now must deal with how YOU put it down. You took that ground. In a way that is quite sneaky and “secret”. You don’t fight over the narrative in the open. You quietly put it down, and once it’s on paper – you own it. You have won.

I never really was conscious of that before the last couple of months, in finishing up my book, and also suddenly becoming embroiled in a narrative that I want desperately to own, dominate, I already want to tell it, I want it to be MINE already – even if that would mean it would have to end.

I have always preferred the pretend world to the real.

But the lines are getting a bit blurred now.

Anyway, the always-wonderful Maud Newton compiles an awesome list of quotes that I’ve been thinking about all day.