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 -- the snake with it's tail in it's mouth.

 (Embracing Number 1 of these two directives makes Number 2 impossible.  Note well.)


Henry Fielding, in the introduction to Tom Jones, discovers the E=MC2 of fiction:

 My reader then is not to be surprized if, in the course of this work, he shall find some chapters very short, and others altogether as long; some that contain only the time of a single day, and others that comprise years; in a word, if my history seems sometimes to stand still, and sometimes to fly.  For all which I shall not look on myself as accountable to any court of critical jurisdiction whatever:  for I am, in reality, the founder of a new province of writing, and so I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein.

This one we all know, and those writers who don't will know it as they work:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again.  Fail better.

More to come.


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