Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.
Seamus HeaneyRead
My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the burdens and obligations often associated with writing prose.
Seamus Heaney suggests that writing prose is frequently linked with feelings of duty and urgency, highlighting how much of it is driven by deadlines and a sense of obligation rather than inspiration or creativity. It conveys the struggle writers face when the act becomes a chore rather than a joyous expression.
In practice
In a workshop on creative writing, discussing the challenges writers face with deadlines, this quote illustrates a common sentiment.
Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.
What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.
In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example.
I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright - it reflects you.
I don't believe chance can play a role in my literature.
What I try to do is write a story about a detective rather than a detective story. Keeping the reader fooled until the last, possible moment is a good trick and I usually try to play it, but I can't attach more than secondary importance to it. The puzzle isn't so interesting to me as the behavior of the detective attacking it.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Writers of feminist dystopian fiction are alert to the realities that grind down women's lives, that make the unthinkable suddenly thinkable.
A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
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