Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.
Interpretation
Fiction transforms mundane experiences into beautiful narratives.
In this quote, Jonathan Franzen expresses the idea that fiction has the power to elevate ordinary and discarded experiences into something valuable and meaningful. He suggests that through the creative process, writers can take what society overlooks and turn it into beautiful stories and insights that resonate with readers.
In practice
This quote can inspire aspiring writers during a literary workshop.
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.
The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement
All the same it is being said everywhere that I played too softly, or rather, too delicately for people used to the piano-pounding of the artists here.
A writer of story books! What kind of business in life-what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation-may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!
Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.
I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.
If they would, for Example, praise the Beauty of a Woman, or any other Animal, they describe it by Rhombs, Circles, Parallelograms, Ellipses, and other geometrical terms.
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