The Mountains of Instead

  LITTLE LESSONS FROM THE MASTERS: PART TWO First, one from the now nearly forgotten novelist Peter DeVries, a onetime favorite of mine:   There is nothing for fiction to do but to return to narrative, as there is nothing for a drunk to do but go home.   I copied this next from – I believe – Molly Lefebvre’s marvelous biography Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium.     It’s from a notebook; he’s addressing himself:   My dear fellow!   never be ashamed of scheming! -- you can't think of living less than 4,000 years, and that would nearly suffice for your present schemes.   To be sure, if they go on in the same ratio to the performance, then a small difficulty arises; but never mind! look on the bright side always and die in a dream!   And from a Coleridge journal: The common end of all narrative, nay, of all, poems is to convert a series into a whole:   to make those events, which in real or imagined History, move in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion -

  March 28: In a large crowd (one of those conference crowds I = m frequently in now in dreams) walking through woods on their way from one meeting place to another. We passed over a border without my knowing, and I had no passport to get back B only a damp and   illegible ID card.   Then at an airline desk asking my daughter if she had her passport. Trouble, canceled and delayed flights.   I am driving with Ralph my agent through a Midwestern city at evening B his kindly, courtly Chinese dream-assistant telling me that the bill for the car, which L had rented, would be $800. March 30: No memory of the part where I lost something or suffered some setback   B but then out on the usual dark city streets.   Saw a young, tough girl driving a crazy three-wheeled a motorcycle B admired her toughness and skill.   But she was going too fast on the potholed road, wouldn = t stop, finally lost control and was flung out onto the street.   I was following B in a car now B and

  Long ago, it was common to keep a copybook – a blank book meant only for copying out bits of wisdom or beauty gleaned from writing.   These are now kept digitally, and often shared with the world as soon as gathered.   I kept, for a couple of years, an actual blank book in which I wrote things in my reading that struck me, since in those days I was learning (or attempting to learn) how to be a writer.    I still have that copybook, and I’ll share the quotes having direct (or indirect) application to the arts and crafts of writing. When that little book was full it was a new age, and I recorded them on the computer. Maybe they will be useful to you.   I think they were to me, though it may be that I mostly just admired them, or nodded at how true they seemed.     The first is from Edith Wharton, prolific and hardworking author ( The Age of Innocence , The House of Mirth) writing at the end of her career, in 1934:         What is writing a novel like?            1.  The beginn