Stranger Fiction - On writing

It's difficult to write, more difficult than people would imagine, and it's dangerous too. Everybody think they can write, and that may be true in a very basic sense for anybody, who is not illiterate. But to write artistically, to perform for the masses, and to produce a spectacle with the use of the pen, is an extreme exertation of the spirit, and many have died from it.

“Poverty is a factor in all creative writing. An author must always remember, he needs to eat.”

Edgar Allen Poe's famous short stories, The Pit and the Pendulum and The House of Usher, are both about the end of the age of theocracy and aristocracy and the dawning of a new, more meritocratic order. In the first he employs symbols of hell and finality, in the other he describes the fall of the ruling class as a product of isolation, inbreeding and mental derangement.

"In American Gods Neil Gaiman points out that religion is a two-man con, dependent on a monstrous enemy. The only way to defeat the gods is to starve them of attention. I think that is why the book contains only a few references to Jesus and Christianity, aside from the swearing."

If you lose the drive to write a story or the sense of completion in your words, don't expand your scope, narrow it down.

Aliens from outer space would probably only be interested in a handful of literary works, namely The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Moby Dick. In the case of Moby Dick they would wonder out loud about the way Herman Melville predicted the collapse of civilization due to a frenzy over fossil fuels. After that, they would develop a taste for Mozart.

"Any transformation is a death. Ovid's characters all die. They are victims of ethereal forces or despotic rulers, rolled into one. They are victims of of greed, of lust, of paranoid rage and of administrative force. Their deaths are not beautiful. Metamorphosis is euphemism in its most pronounced form."

If you can easily write a brief synopsis summing up the theme of the story, it is not a very good story.

It is a mistake to believe you are qualified to write about something, because you have experienced it. You must live a story 1000 times in your imagination, before it comes to life.

They took all the women from me, every one that I loved, and indiscriminately also those I only appreciated. By 'they', of course, I refer to the gods, who do not exist. They wanted me to become an author. Sometimes I studied the subject, as if I wanted the same, and sometimes I rebelled against this horrifying fate, which paradoxically was when I experienced my best stories.

Nothing is more important, when you write, than to nourish your idiosyncracies.

Herman Melville wrote the great American novel. It will be remembered along with Gilgamesh, the first epic, Mahabharata, the Iliad and the Odyssee. Moby Dick was published two years after the first commercial oil drilling in America.

"The writer practices what every husband knows to be true; to be loved one must lie often and with pleasure."

“When an airplane went down during dogfights other pilots would say that 'it's writing', referring to the trail of smoke. The greatest poems were written by dying men or artists, who perceived their own inevitable doom.”

There are too few scars in modern literature, too little disfigurement, too little consequence. You have plenty of blood and plenty of wounds, but they are skin deep. The psycho-dramas of our age rarely touches the sublime effect of fate. Fatality, in the language of modern writing, means death. It's like authors, as well as the audiences, have a distaste for anything reminding them of the irreversible nature of choice, of finality, and of entropy.

I love everybody who like what I write, or even understand what I am talking about in the slightest; I know they have suffered much.

There is this ancient Greek fable about a bronze cow used to put enemies of the king to a brutal end. The prisoners were put inside the cow. The cow was placed on a fire. The screams of the doomed were transformed into pleasant music. That's basically the fate of an author. All the people out there who dream of becoming authors - if they are not simply motivated by greed - are sorely mistaken. Regretting to have neglected creative writing in favor of a more mundane profession is like someone regretting not to have become a professional boxer.

"I am strongly opposed to authenticity in fiction writing. Realism belongs in journalism, and even there it's an orphan. In literature realism can only correspond to an abstract model of reality, a median of what is likely to occur, disregarding all the incredible and highly unlikely events that actually occur all the time. That's why they say reality is stranger than fiction."

"Humans have written very few stories that do not glorify self-sacrifice. That's essentially why they say Don Quixote is the first modern novel and the greatest."

“Fiction writing rests on a sublime balance between daydream and nightmare.”

In Greek the last words of Joseph K would be 'kynikos'.

In a world where every event is immediately published, every phenomenon subjected to clinical studies and every topic openly discussed, there are on two unexplored frontiers: Space and the human mind or, in broader terms, the spiritual aspect of life. These are the two great unknowns, of which we know next to nothing, taking only a few superficial readings and, from these, extrapolating what we currently considers the truth.

All science fiction comments on the contemporary, not the future. We are, per definition, incapable of encompassing concerns for the future. Our instincts are rigged to protect us right here and right now.

I never wrote anything. I paint with words. I paint what I see every day.