Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I'm determined to be one that gets better.
Edmund WhiteRead
I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting.
Interpretation
The quote reflects an evolution in the author's writing style to prioritize storytelling over literary form.
In this quote, Edmund White discusses how his approach to writing transformed as he began to explore gay subjects in his novels. He moved away from a self-aware, literary style to a more transparent one, allowing the narrative to take precedence and engage the reader with the inherent interest of the story itself. This illustrates a profound understanding of how style can impact the delivery and reception of content.
In practice
This quote can be referenced in a lecture about the evolution of writing styles in modern literature.
Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I'm determined to be one that gets better.
I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.
In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre.
If bigots oppose gay marriage so vehemently, it must be because marriage is a defining institution for them; gays will never be fully accepted until they can marry and adopt, like anyone else.
When we are young... we often experience things in the present with a nostalgia-in-advance, but we seldom guess what we will truly prize years from now.
I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission.
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people.
The first principle of architectural beauty is that the essential lines of a construction be determined by a perfect appropriateness to its use.
It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.
There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
It wasn't stone. It wasn't welded steel. It wasn't traditional sculpture. They thought it was craft, or something else, but not art. They couldn't define it in the early Fifties when I was starting out.
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