Writers end up writing stories-or rather, stories' shadows-and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough
Interpretation
Writers create narratives that often feel incomplete, and they struggle with the dissatisfaction of never fully capturing their intentions.
This quote by Joy Williams expresses the profound sense of inadequacy that writers often experience. Despite their efforts to bring stories to life, they often feel that what they produce falls short of their vision. The phrase 'stories' shadows' suggests that the tales told are merely reflections or echoes of the deeper narratives the writers wish to convey, highlighting a continual pursuit of fulfillment in their craft that often remains elusive.
In practice
A writer could use this quote in a workshop to discuss the struggles of the creative process.
What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes...
Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader's face.
The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.
I want to be as though newborn. To be almost primitive.
I wear anything of culture, from the Earth or beyond. The whole planet is my shop.
A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
Translation is a form of passive aggression. In doing it, a writer chooses to forgo original authorship so as to play havoc with a foreign original in a process of imitation, zigzagging between the foreign and receiving languages but in the last analysis cancelling the first in favor of the second.
What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?
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