A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough.

Joy Williams

Categorized in : Thinking Enough Agents

Someone once told me a story about long term relationships. To think of them as a continent to explore. I could spend a lifetime backpacking through Africa, and I would still never know all there is to know about that continent. To stay the course, to stay intentional, to stay curious and connected - that's the heart of it. But it's so easy to lose track of the trail, to get tired, to want to give up, or to want a new adventure. It can be so easy to lose sight of the goodness and mystery within the person sitting right in front of you.

tired giving-up heart

The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what's being said before the writer figures out how to say it.

figures stories doe

You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what th... by Joy Williams

You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.

why-things-happen worry mean

The writer trusts nothing she writes-it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control. . . . Good writing . . . explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in her head.

writing morning beautiful

It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole; of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well.

who-cares these-days writing

The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.

reader writing wings

What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes...

dark ordinary people

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopeless ly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.

grace doe writing

Words at night were feral things. by Joy Williams

Words at night were feral things.

night

Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader's face.

comfort faces writing

Did the walls of the barn start to tremble by Joy Williams

Did the walls of the barn start to tremble

wall inspiration faith

You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.

eye animal believe

You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the long familiar ground that in that moment seems so glorious, so charged with beauty, strange. In their jaws you are carried so effortlessly, with such great care that you think it will never end, you long for it not to end, and then you wake and know that, indeed, they have not brought you back.

race animal thinking

Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible... by Joy Williams

Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.

irreversible inevitable

But who knows what good might come from the least of us? From the bones of old horses is made the most beautiful Prussian Blue.

horse blue beautiful

Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly. by Joy Williams

Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly.

courses usual done

Writers are like eremites or anchorites - natural-born eremites or anchorites - who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place.

caves natural firsts

One writes to find words' meanings. by Joy Williams

One writes to find words' meanings.

writing

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire w... by Joy Williams

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.

writing-process process writing

There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when one is drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat and significance, deep significance.

type drunk dream