Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation.
Interpretation
The creative process of writing often involves both spontaneous expression and careful refinement.
Siri Hustvedt emphasizes the dual nature of writing, where the initial burst of creativity is largely instinctual and unfiltered, while the later stages involve conscious decisions to refine and improve the text. This highlights how writers balance natural inspiration with the disciplined art of editing to enhance their work.
In practice
During a writing workshop, I shared this quote to highlight the importance of both creativity and editing in the writing process.
Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed.
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed
People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
I don't outline at all; I don't find it useful, and I don't like the way it boxes me in. I like the element of surprise and spontaneity, of letting the story find its own way.
A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
As a photographer who is constantly in violent, bloody situations where the instinct is to turn away, I am always trying to figure out how to make people not turn away.
What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.
Actors are agents of change. A film, a piece of theater, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.
People are always asking me what my lyrics mean. Does it mean this, does it mean that, that's all anybody wants to know. F**k them, darling. I say what any decent poet would say if you dared ask him to analyze his work: If you see it, dear, then it's there. ... I think my melodies are superior to my lyrics. ... I was never too keen on the British music press. They've called us a supermarket hype, and they used to suggest that we didn't write our own songs.
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