Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
Interpretation
Good literature requires deep introspection and solitude from the writer.
This quote emphasizes the importance of solitude and introspection for writers in creating profound literature. Jonathan Franzen suggests that only by isolating oneself and exploring their inner depths can an author produce truly impactful and authentic stories that resonate with readers.
In practice
In a writers' workshop, to inspire participants to delve deeper into their topics.
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.
If you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person - a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people - I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.
When I'm writing, I'm trying to immerse myself in the chaos of an emotional experience, rather than separate myself from it and look back at it from a distance with clarity and tell it as a story. Because that's how life is lived, you know?
To be a photographer, one must photograph. No amount of book learning, no checklist of seminars attended, can substitute for the simple act of making pictures.
Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.
The Iron Man came to the top of the cliff. How far had he walked? Nobody knows. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. How was he made? Nobody knows. Taller than a house the Iron Man stood at the top of the cliff, at the very brink, in the darkness.
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
And you know there’s nothing like writing a song about someone who’s mean to you, and just makes your life miserable…and then winning a Grammy for it.
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