a comment on art by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was specifically addressing the benefits of attending university creative writing programs when he wrote, "The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow." Most of us writers won't get the opportunity to attend an established writing program. But many of us can be blessed enough to hook up with a supportive and talented group of writers, hopefully for critique groups, or workshops and conferences, or just to share the "rapture and misery," the moments atop the mountain and the dark nights in the gutters of doubt and insecurity. If our soul is to grow through the practice of our art we can find encouragement and security in the company of other practitioners of the art.

Don't know a single soul who writes? Try one or both of these online communities:
WritersCafe.org or Fictionaut.com

writing as a "series of permissions"

I love this quote from writer Susan Sontag. It's taken from her essay "Directions: Write, Read, Rewrite. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 as Needed" reprinted in the 2001 publication of Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times.

"Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in a certain way. To invent. To leap. To fly. To fall. To find your own characteristic way of narrating and insisting; that is, to find you own inner freedom."

I think it's important to realize our "own characteristic way of narrating" is uniquely our own and that we must insist on giving ourselves permission to express it. Much can be learned from workshops, critique sessions, writers programs and the like, but ultimately the writer must take what she has learned and find her own way.

Follow the link below to read Sontag's essay.
"Directions: Write, Read, Rewrite. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 as Needed"

Art is ...

"Art is a shutting in in order to shut out. Art is a ritualistic binding of the perpetual motion machine that is nature. ... Art is spellbinding. Art fixes the audience in its seat, stops the feet before a painting, fixes a book in the hand. Contemplation is a magic act." - Camille Paglia

Finish this sentence. Art is . . .

the question of style

"We always worry that we are copying someone else, that we don't have our own style. Don't worry. Writing is a communal act. Contrary to popular belief, a writer is not Prometheus alone on a hill full of fire. We are very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us. We live in the present with all the history, ideas, and soda pop of this time. It all gets mixed up in our writing." - Natalie Goldberg

I've been thinking about the nature of style a lot lately. What it is exactly. How we develop it. What elements constitute our "style" of writing.

J. A. Spender said, "If you are getting the worst of it in an argument with a literary man, always attack his style. That'll touch him if nothing else will."

I think style is, perhaps, the quirk or habit or preoccupation in our writing that sets us apart. I fear it may be that thing that others desire to drive out of us, stop us from doing. The question for me is always: Is this (questionable thing) just a part of my style or is it a problem in my writing? One might think that's an easy question to answer. I don't find it so.

Consider Hemingway's comments on his style:

"In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardness are easy to see, and they called it style."

I don't want to embrace a mistake and foolishly cling to a habit I think defines "my style." Conversely, I don't want to strip away that which sets me apart, leaving my writing generic and bland.

Montesquieu said, "A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well."

Am I a hodgepodge of writers I have read? Is what makes me unique part of my "awkwardness" in writing? Can my "speaking badly" help me "speak well"?