When you're writing fiction or poetry... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of dedication and focus in creative writing, suggesting that a writer should care only about their craft.
Raymond Carver's quote highlights that successful writing, whether in fiction or poetry, requires a deep commitment to the writing process itself, fostering a sense of indifference to external distractions. For aspiring writers, this indifference is portrayed not as apathy, but as a concentrated passion that allows them to fully immerse themselves in their work, enabling their creativity to flourish.
In practice
In a writing workshop, you could quote Carver to encourage participants to focus deeply on their projects.
Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read. Fought against it for a minute. Then looked out the window at the rain. And gave over. Put myself entirely in the keep of this rainy morning. Would I live my life over again? Make the same unforgivable mistakes? Yes, given half a chance. Yes.
Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.
Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
When I'm writing, I write every day. It's lovely when that's happening. One day dovetailing into the next. Sometimes I don't even know what day of the week it is.
It's strange. You never start out life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat and a thief. Or a liar.
Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones.
Let proportion be found not only in numbers and measures, but also in sounds, weights, times, and positions, and what ever force there is.
What music is better able to do than language is to represent the complexity of human emotional states.
The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.
Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.
If an essay has a 'motive,' it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside.
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