Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation.
Interpretation
The creative process of writing often involves both spontaneous expression and careful refinement.
Siri Hustvedt emphasizes the dual nature of writing, where the initial burst of creativity is largely instinctual and unfiltered, while the later stages involve conscious decisions to refine and improve the text. This highlights how writers balance natural inspiration with the disciplined art of editing to enhance their work.
In practice
During a writing workshop, I shared this quote to highlight the importance of both creativity and editing in the writing process.
Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed.
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed
People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
And the marvellous rose became crimson, like the rose of the eastern sky. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as a ruby was the heart
Right now a moment of time is fleeting by! Capture its reality in paint! To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become that moment, make ourselves a sensitive recording plate...Give the image of what we actually see, forgetting everything that has been seen before our time.
We're a very expensive group; we break a lot of rules. It's unheard of to combine opera with a rock theme, my dear .
My greatest debt will always be to the movie-going public of yesterday and today, without whose love and devotion I would have had no story to tell.
Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age, such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.