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Book: On Teaching and Writing Fiction
Quotes of Book: On Teaching and Writing
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  1. Wallace Stegner _ On Teaching and Writing

    And I would not blame you if you still asked, Why bother to make contact with kindred spirits you never see and may never hear from, who perhaps do not even exist except in your hopes? Why spend ten years in an apprenticeship to fiction only to discover that this society so little values what you do that it won't pay you a living wage for it?
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  2. Wallace Stegner _ On Teaching and Writing

    And though creative writing as an intellectual exercise may be pursued with profit by anyone, writing as a profession is not a job for amateurs, dilettantes, part-time thinkers, 25-watt feelers, the lazy, the insensitive, or the imitative. It is for the creative, and creativity implies both talent and hard work.
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  3. Wallace Stegner _ On Teaching and Writing

    and so give your uncommon readers a chance to join you in the solidarity of pain and love and the vision of human possibility. But isn't it enough? For lack of the full heart's desire, won't it serve?"
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  4. Wallace Stegner _ On Teaching and Writing

    The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic. They have to be put into the form of people and actions . . .
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  5. Wallace Stegner _ On Teaching and Writing

    The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
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  6. Wallace Stegner _ On Teaching and Writing

    Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark.
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  7. Wallace Stegner _ On Teaching and Writing

    After all, what are any of us after but the conviction of belonging?
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  8. Wallace Stegner _ On Teaching and Writing

    By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.
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