I mentioned the book Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process in a previous post. Well, I finally finished reading it. Because of our move, I ended up checking it out of three different libraries before I got through all the essays. Now I want my own copy because it’s chock full of ideas that I want to revisit, ideas like the beauty of memorizing poetry, the importance of first lines, and the ways literature can move us.
The authors who contributed to Light the Dark share passages from novels or poetry that affected them profoundly. In that vein, I hope these quotations will inspire you, too.
Khaled Hosseini (inspired by Stephen King)
“You write because you have an idea in your mind that feels so genuine, so important, so true. And yet, by the time this idea passes through the different filters of your mind, and into your hand, and onto the page or computer screen — it becomes distorted, and it’s been diminished. The writing you end up with is an approximation, if you’re lucky, of whatever it was you really wanted to say… Even my finished books are approximations of what I intended to do. I try to narrow the gap, as much as I possibly can, between what I wanted to say and what’s actually on the page. But there’s still a gap, there always is. It’s very, very difficult. And it’s humbling.”
Michael Chabon (inspired by Jorge Luis Borges)
“In the Borges story, the narrator’s reaction to the Aleph — “I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity” — is not how I feel on a daily basis when I am writing. But it serves as a reminder of what I ought to be feeling while I work, an I’m describing the behavior of human beings and of the world.”
Leslie Jamison (inspired by Anne Carson)
“I really believe that there are extraordinary things to be said about deeply ordinary experiences. When I teach nonfiction, the biggest student conundrum around personal writing is: Why would anybody care what happened to me? There’s a shame around just having lived an ordinary life. And it’s not like they’re wrong — it is going to be harder for them to get a book deal, say, for their memoir of living in the suburbs. But the paralyzing anxiety I hear students articulate, and also feel in myself, is what ‘this is not uncommon’ speaks to: the experience of trying to find words for an emotion that mattered so much, even while recognizing it’s the most common thing in the world.”