The more you know, the more unflinchingly you deny casual beliefs and Accepted Wisdom when it flies in the face of reality, the more carefully you observe the world and its people around you, the better chance you have of writing something meaningful and well-crafted.
Interpretation
Knowledge and critical thinking enhance the quality of meaningful expression.
This quote emphasizes the importance of knowledge and critical thinking in crafting meaningful narratives. The more one challenges preconceived notions and observes the world intentionally, the better equipped they are to write with depth and authenticity. Ellison highlights that a true understanding of reality allows for a richer and more impactful writing experience.
In practice
In a writing workshop, you might say this quote to encourage participants to think critically about their assumptions.
People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.
When you're all alone out there, on the end of the typewriter, with each new story a new appraisal by the world of whether you can still get it up or not, arrogance and self-esteem and deep breathing are all you have. It often looks like egomania. I assure you it's the bold coverup of the absolutely terrified.
I think [religion] is presumptuous and I think it is silly, because it makes you believe that you are less than what you can be. As long as you can blame everything on some unseen deity, you donβt ever have to be responsible for your own behavior.
Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you β as if you haven't been told a million times already β that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.
The trap into which all writers have, will, or should fall into, of writing The Great American Watchamacallit, is such an uncluttered and inviting one that from time to time I'm sure even the greatest have to pull themselves up short by the Shift key to remind themselves that it is story first that they should write.
I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned. Adult. You have become adult.
The greatest truth is honesty, and the greatest falsehood is dishonesty.
The joy of working at something to find out what it means to me is what I grew up with.
Experience is the only teacher we have. We may talk and reason all our lives, but we shall not understand a word of truth until we experience it ourselves.
The thing about smart people is that they seem like crazy people to dumb people.
Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.
It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren't doing.
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