Writing is very improvisational. It's like trying to fix a broken sewing machine with safety pins and rubber bands. A lot of tinkering.
Interpretation
Writing involves creativity and adaptation, often requiring unconventional solutions.
Margaret Atwood's quote highlights the unpredictable nature of writing, likening it to a process filled with trial and error. Just as one might use makeshift tools like safety pins and rubber bands to fix a broken sewing machine, writers must often improvise, experimenting with their ideas and techniques to achieve the desired outcome in their work.
In practice
In a workshop on creative writing, you could share this quote to illustrate the importance of flexibility in the writing process.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. I'll share the formula I learned while forging my way forward as a full-time painter for forty-four years. The steps all break down to one simple sentence: Make art that connects with enough folks for you to earn a splendid living.
If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.
Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.
Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.
I'd rather make a show 100 people need to see, than a show that 1000 people want to see.
In my brain were stored a thousand pictures.
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