Why do we read and why do we read literature? The British scholar Gilbert Murray, an unimpeachable authority in classical studies during the first half of the twentieth century, thought that readers could be divided into two sorts: some read for amusement, for appreciating the craft of writing, for gathering the ideas to carry on …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
Watching Images
We read works of literature both for their ideas and for the ways in which their authors convey those ideas to us. In his collection of essays entitled The Cutting of an Agate, the poet W. B. Yeats says that “it is not possible to separate an emotion or a spiritual state from the image …
Greek Lucidity
We can say, I think, that writing is sometimes as difficult as it is because it strains our vision, as if with our inner eye—our insight—we are trying to see the meaning, the significance of something we come up against, an object, an event, an imaginative world of our own making. But the just-right word …
One and Not Done
One try, one draft—no, that never works in writing. It is one of the great mysteries of our already mysterious enough human mind why putting words to the ideas we have is so often so difficult. We try to get past that obstacle with the get-it-done-with-one method, but the first and final draft that method …
Artificializing Ourselves
There is a meaningful distinction to be made between publicity and advertising. To publicize is to make known what in fact exists. To advertise is to make known what may or may not in fact exist. I might publicize a meeting by stating its subject, time, and place, but to advertise a product I wish …