Saturday, December 04, 2010

The art of fiction ...

... An interview with Terrence Holt. (Hat tip, Lee Lowe.)

The stories are about the language as much as anything. There's an automatic tendency, which is reinforced by the way we teach people how to read and think about language, to believe that words are simply these little containers we put meaning into and get meaning out of. It's as if the words matter only for what they "contain." If only they were so obedient! But it would be a very dull world for writers. Words are objects in and of themselves. They have very little in common with Mason jars, except that they're both kinds of objects: compared to that, any capacity to convey something else is secondary, almost accidental. Words are extraordinarily refractory and wonderfully fun to play with. To the extent that they mean things, they do so in combination with each other, and the reader, and the time of day, all sorts of incredibly complicated things that nobody understands very well. Much of my work in writing is to try and pare things down enough that I think I've got a handle on what's going on. Some of the stories are about that process: People in isolated situations trying to strip things down to the bone so they can get some kind of handle on their situation

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