I feel there has to be a certain amount of improvisation as I’m writing, which means any idea or any commitment to a project is risky. It involves time; it involves gathering of material, and sometimes it just doesn’t work. Sometimes it does. As I’m starting out on a project, I can’t tell if it will click or not. Joanna Scott Read Quote
Reviewers try to square the antics of a writer’s life with the antics in the fiction. Even satirical verbal play is too often read and admired as autobiographical expression. And thanks to the democratic exposures of the web, it’s easier than ever to document private experiences and divulge the most intimate secrets. Joanna Scott Read Quote
I’m really such a bumbler! Writing fiction is like arranging furniture in a dark room. I can’t see what I’m doing. I grope for the right words. I bump against the wrong words and stumble and stub my toe and curse and keep trying to guess what belongs in the space. Joanna Scott Read Quote
If the rules of a language are followed, words usually make sense. But these very rules can stir the impulse to rebel. We’re obliged to keep trying to convey meaning through correct sentences. After a while, the good-soldier rigidity of polished prose can begin to seem dull, and it gets harder to resist the temptation of nonsense. Joanna Scott Read Quote
Out of Africa,’ Dinesen’s second book, is a love story, though not the one portrayed by Streep and Redford in the film. The memoir is about Dinesen’s love of East Africa – the cultures, the landscapes, the animals. The feeling that saturates the book is reverence. Joanna Scott Read Quote
How wonderful it would be to scatter words as they rise to consciousness, to let them lie where they fall. Joanna Scott Read Quote
I don’t think Donald Barthelme would have minded being called a confusing writer. Confusion was a favorite subject for him in his essays and reviews, and it’s enacted in his fiction in a mishmash of dizzying incongruities. Joanna Scott Read Quote
As children know, there’s lots of fun in nonsense. We never stop benefiting from staying flexible, open and responsive, even in the midst of confusion. Joanna Scott Read Quote
