Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that meaningful fiction should stem from an author's personal exploration of deeper themes, rather than simply being a commercial endeavor.
In this quote, Jonathan Franzen emphasizes the importance of authenticity and personal experience in writing fiction. He argues that literature should be a reflection of the author's journey into the challenging or mysterious aspects of life, rather than just a product created for financial gain. By highlighting the need for genuine exploration in storytelling, Franzen advocates for a deeper connection between the author's experiences and the themes they choose to explore in their work.
In practice
In a writing workshop, a facilitator could use this quote to encourage participants to draw on their own life experiences.
Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.
If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.
To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
I wanted pretty pictures of older women - women who are trying too hard but succeeding - pulling off an extreme look. What I didn't know would creep into the portraits was a vulnerability behind the strong facade that most of them wear.
Trust me, there's not one night a week I'm not in a theater somewhere. I adore theater, and I go out with friends, so I do have some nights off.
Drama criticism ... is a self-knowing account of the way in which one's consciousness has been modified during an evening at the theatre.
A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.
The great thing about a record is it frees your imagination; it gives your eyes a rest and lets your mind wander. There's the special thing that each record can mean a different thing to every person listening to it.
The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.
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