Writerly Humility: judsongreene.micro.blog

@isaacgreene Amazing quote. My Facebook makes me think “your college classmates took ‘be fruitful and multiply’ way more seriously than you did.”

Zann found too late the thesis for my post: Be Jonathan Strange, not Mr. Norrell.

@JudsonGreene thanks for highlighting this tension. Repeated visits to The Met have done a similar thing for me—there’s so much incredible art out there; if I’m going to add anything it’d better really be good!—and yet . . .

@JudsonGreene @elliotlovegrove . . . while the words were still coming out of my mouth, I could feel that they weren’t the full story.

@elliotlovegrove I feel like there’s a connection here to Heraclitus. It’s all flux.

@JudsonGreene I relate to this whole post — the gift/curse of recognizing the strongest craft in others’ work, the wish to discipline one’s own, a late realization that most thinkers are at their most exciting when their ideas are changing. It took publishing my book to set that change in motion!

@ablerism Yeah, love your point about the exciting stuff being what the author discovered in writing. That “I’m onto something, though I’m not exactly sure what” feeling.

I feel like I sometimes live with a false double standard between non-fic and poetry/creative writing. For the latter, my wife (whose craft is creative non-fiction) always says, “No epiphany in the author. No epiphany in the reader.” It’s like the problem when you set out to write the poem “about” something and have foregone the opportunity for mystery or surprise. I love that Annie Dillard line (from Thorton Wilder from an anon source), “One line of a sonnet falls from the ceiling, and you tap in the others around it with a jeweler’s hammer.” But then with the academic stuff I read I start thinking that those epiphanies had better be conference-paper tested a million times before it’s put in print. Bad bad not good.