The task is not primarily to have a story, but to penetrate the story, to discard the elements of it that are merely shell, or husk, that give apparent form to the story, but actually obscure the essence. In other words, the problem is to transcend the givens of a narrative.

Deborah Eisenberg

Categorized in : Giving Essence Tasks

You write something and there’s no reality to it. You can’t inject it with any kind of reality. You have to be patient and keep going, and then, one day, you can feel something signaling to you from the innermost recesses. Like a little person trapped under the rubble of an earthquake. And very, very, very slowly you find your way toward the little bit of living impulse.

Deborah Eisenberg

writing earthquakes reality

Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.

Deborah Eisenberg

done writing fiction

Her professors were astonished by her leaps of thought, by the finesse and elegance of her insights. She arrived at hypotheses by sheer intuition and with what eventually one of her mentors described as an almost alarming speed; she was like a dancer, he said, out in the cosmos springing weightlessly from star to star. Drones, merely brilliant, crawled along behind with laborious proofs that supported her assertions.

Deborah Eisenberg

dancer intuition stars

I don't think things are ever exactly the way one expects, and I don't think things are ever the way one assumes they are at the moment. What I actually think is that one has no idea of what things are like, ever.

Deborah Eisenberg

way ideas thinking

Every moment is all the things that have happened before and all the things that are going to happen, and...the way all those things look at one point on their way along a line.

Deborah Eisenberg

lines looks way

Nothing is more fortifying than learning that you have a real reader, a reader who truly responds both accurately and actively. It gives you courage, and you feel, I can crawl out on the branch a little further. It’s going to hold.

Deborah Eisenberg

branches real giving

I always thought of writing as holy. I still do. It’s not something to be approached casually.

Deborah Eisenberg

holy stills writing

time is as adhesive as love, and the more time you spend with someone the greater the likelihood of finding yourself with a permanent sort of thing to deal with that people casually refer to as 'friendship,' as if that were the end of the matter.

Deborah Eisenberg

finding-yourself friendship people

When one writes, there’s the double horror of discovering not only what it is that one so fears but also the triviality of that fear.

Deborah Eisenberg

triviality horror writing

I'm a person with virtually no feelings.

Deborah Eisenberg

persons feelings

It's broadening. You meet people in your family you'd never happen to run into otherwise.

Deborah Eisenberg

our-family running people

Everything makes me angry, unless it makes me sad.

Deborah Eisenberg

angry make-me-angry

Everything seemed to change on that one day, but really, I think, things had been changing and changing over the course of many previous days, and perhaps what eventually appears to be information always appears at first to be just flotsam, meaningless fragments, until enough flotsam accretes to manifest, when one notices it, a construction.

Deborah Eisenberg

one-day change thinking

Art is inherently subversive. It’s destabilizing. It undermines what you already know and what you already think. It is the opposite of propaganda.

Deborah Eisenberg

opposites art thinking

I’m a bit of an expert on anger, having suffered from it all through my youth, when I was both brunt and font. It’s certainly the most miserable state to be in but it’s also tremendously gratifying, really—rage feels justified. And it’s an excellent substitute for action. Why would you want to sacrifice rage to go about the long, difficult, dreary business of making something more tolerable?

Deborah Eisenberg

sacrifice experts long

The world we live in has been and is being increasingly politicized so that our daily experience is more and more a matter of public policy. A lot of fiction comes out of a child's feeling of, "Hey, that's not fair."

Deborah Eisenberg

feelings writing children

I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

Deborah Eisenberg

short very like experience

For someone whose goal in life was to stay unemployed, I can't imagine what I thought was going to happen. I was so terrified of everything, I just thought I'd curl up in the gutter and die, and by a complete mistake, my life turned out to be absolutely wonderful.

Deborah Eisenberg

my-life die mistake life

The first story I wrote was called 'Days,' and I have very little affection for it.

Deborah Eisenberg

days first story affection

Writing does change you, and of course it feels good to do things, so you could say writing is de facto therapeutic. But really, one writes to write.

Deborah Eisenberg

good you change writing