Writer. Contributing Editor at The Discarded Image. Digital Content Strategist. Here's where I publicly explore the books I'm reading, the projects I'm working on, and other current interests. Well said: Welty on the shared reader/writer experience
This week, Eudora Welty is my mentor on the craft of writing. Here are some of her comments on the reading and writing of short stories:
Reader and writer make it a double experience. It is part of the great thing in which they share most—pleasure. And it is certainly part of the strong natural curiosity which readers feel to varying degree and which writers feel to the most compelling degree as to how any one story ever gets told. The only way a writer can satisfy his own curiosity is to write it…
Some stories leave a train of light behind them, meteor-like, so that much later than they strike our eyes we may see their meaning like an aftereffect…
Plots are, indeed, what the story writer sees with, and so do we as we read. The plot is the Why. Why? is asked and replied to at various depths; the fishes in the sea are bigger the deeper we go…
I think it ought to be said that a fiction writer can try anything. He has tried a great deal, but presumably not everything. The possibilities are endless because the stirring of the imagination never rests, and because we can never stop trying to make feeling felt.
So we know what will most pertinently describe the writing of our future too. Not rules, not esthetics, not problems and their solutions: not rules so long as there is imagination; not esthetics until after there is passion; not even problems that will always rise again and again for the honest writer. For at the other end of the writing is the reader. There is sure to be somewhere the reader, who is a user himself of imagination and thought, who knows, perhaps, as much about the need of communication as the writer.
Reader and writer, we wish each other well. Don’t we want and don’t we understand the same thing? A story of beauty and passion, some fresh approximation of human truth?
From Eudora Welty, On Writing (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), 3-28.
