Quote of the Day (Neil Gaiman, on Characters Who ‘Break Through to Another Reality’)

“People are drawn to stories in which characters do break through to another reality, because it is a universal experience to look at the world and go, Is this all there is? Or even if this is all there is, do I actually understand it? Are there clues and keys that would give me a new understanding? The glory of fiction is that I am lying to you. It's the same deal a good stage magician makes: You are going to be lied to.” — English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theater, and films Neil Gaiman, quoted in “Soapbox: The Columnists—WSJ. Asks Five Luminaries To Weigh in on Single Topic; This Month: Breakthroughs,” WSJ. Magazine, November 2020

(Photo of Neil Gaiman taken at the 2007 Scream Awards, Oct. 19, 2007, by pinguino k from North Hollywood.)

Quote of the Day (Edna Ferber, on Why ‘The Creative Writer is Rarely Alone’)

“The creative writer is rarely alone. The room in which one works is peopled with the men and women and children of the writer’s imagination.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright Edna Ferber (1885-1968), A Kind of Magic (1963)

Quote of the Day (Pat Barker, on a Story’s Voice, ‘The Breath on the Mirror’)

“I feel that the project doesn’t start until you’ve got the voice. I call it ‘the breath on the mirror.’ If there’s no breath on the mirror, it’s dead. And once the characters are talking to each other, even if there’s no story and I don’t know what it’s about, I stop worrying because once they’re talking to each other and disagreeing with each other about various things, you know you are going to have a story very quickly.” —Booker Prize-winning English novelist Pat Barker, “The WD Interview: Pat Barker,” Writer’s Digest, January/February 2025

If you haven’t read Pat Barker’s World War I trilogy, Regeneration (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and Ghost Road), you really owe it to yourself to see what wonders she can bring to historical fiction.

I have not yet read a later trilogy of hers, The Women of Troy, but I have to think that it must be very good, too. And a key part of her success has to be how she brings her characters to life in dialogue, as she describes above.

(The image accompanying this post, of Pat Barker at the Durham Book Festival in 2012, was taken October 27, 2012, by summonedbyfells.)

Quote of the Day (David Mason, on Fiction and ‘Small Passages of Civility in Our Lives’)

“Fiction allows us to mourn with strangers. Even horrifying stories create, by virtue of their shape and their empathy, small passages of civility in our lives. Civilization is something we must choose; humanity is something we must make. Novels are particularly well-equipped to show us how social problems affect individual lives, but artists rarely envision viable solutions to the problems they dramatize. Perhaps it is easier to forgive in the imagination than in the streets and pubs and houses.”—American poet, librettist ,essayist, and memoirist David Mason, “Forgiving the Past,” The Sewanee Review, Spring 1998 (“Irish Literature Today”)

Mason’s essay appeared in the relatively early days of American polarization, as ideologically driven cable news stations and Internet sites were just starting to exacerbate real but still not unbridgeable differences in the nation. Since then, more and more people are addicted to their mobile phones and anti-social media.

Genres that require time, patience, and understanding—very much including the novel—have been increasingly falling by the wayside in the last quarter-century—and those “small passages of civility in our lives” that Mason hailed are growing increasingly narrow.

(The accompanying outdoor photo of David Mason, taken Apr. 24, 2012, was sent by the poet to Christine Mason.)

Quote of the Day (W.E.B. DuBois, on the Need To ‘Distinguish Between Fact and Desire’)

“If we are going, in the future,… to use human experience for the guidance of mankind, we have got clearly to distinguish between fact and desire.

“In the first place, somebody in each era must make clear the facts with utter disregard to his own wish and desire and belief. What we have got to know, so far as possible, are the things that actually happened in the world. Then with that much clear and open to every reader, the philosopher and prophet has a chance to interpret these facts; but the historian has no right, posing as scientist, to conceal or distort facts; and until we distinguish between these two functions of the chronicler of human action, we are going to render it easy for a muddled world out of sheer ignorance to make the same mistake ten times over.”— American sociologist, historian, editor, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963), Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935)

Quote of the Day (Chris Offutt, Distinguishing Between a Short Story and a Novel)

“A short story is like taking a small boat to sea and traveling along the coast. You can hear the sounds and see the lights of shore. A novel is like taking a ship straight out into the ocean until there is no land in sight.” —American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, and essayist Chris Offutt quoted by Bradley Sides and Chapter16.org, “Human Drama: Q&A With Novelist Chris Offutt,” Pursuit Magazine, July 21, 2023

Quote of the Day (William Kennedy, on the ‘Precarious’ Trip From Writing Journalism to Fiction)

“The transition from journalism to fiction is always a precarious trip, for journalism foists dangerous illusions on the incipient fiction writer. The daily journalist is trained, for instance, to forget about yesterday and focus on today. There is also a car parked downstairs, ready to carry him off into tomorrow, and so every new day becomes for him a tabula rasa. This is deadly. The fiction writer who puts little or no value on yesterday, or the even more distant past, might just as well have Alzheimer's disease. Serious fiction, especially the novel, has time as its essence and memory as its principal tool.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist (and former journalist) William Kennedy, “Why It Took So Long,” The New York Times, May 20, 1990

Quote of the Day (Celeste Ng, on Fiction and Grace)

“Fiction makes you aware of complications. I'm interested in the times that things go wrong, but I'm also interested in trying to make some kind of meaning from that. Fiction should show you more dimensions. When you start to connect with other people, that's when that kind of humility that allows you to have grace comes in. Grace is something that you do after you've tripped: You're catching yourself and taking something that could have been a negative or a wrongdoing or a shortcoming and moving past it. Grace is about how you handle things when you are wrong or when you have done wrong. It's admitting that everyone, including you, is fallible.”—Author Celeste Ng quoted in “Soapbox—The Columnists; WSJ Asks Six Luminaries to Weigh in on a Single Topic; This Month: Grace,” WSJ. Magazine, December 2019/January 2020

The image accompanying this post, showing Celeste Ng at the 2018 National Book Festival, was taken Sept. 1, 2018, by Avery Jensen.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Ann Patchett, on Religion and Storytelling)

“I suppose my ability to tell a story came from my good nature and a desire to keep everyone [in the family] together. Catholicism also was the perfect prep. Religion, in general, is story-based and teaches you to believe in what you can't see, and I did.”—American novelist and bookstore owner Ann Patchett, quoted by Marc Myers, “House Call: Ann Patchett—A Late Reader, She Made Up Stories,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 25, 2023

Quote of the Day (Thornton Wilder, on the Storyteller’s Gift)

“There is something mysterious about the endowment of the storyteller. Some very great writers possessed very little of it, and some others, lightly esteemed, possessed it in so large a measure that their books survive down the ages, to the confusion of severer critics. Alexandre Dumas had it to an extraordinary degree; while Melville, for all his splendid quality, had it barely sufficiently to raise his work from the realm of nonfiction. It springs, not, as some have said, from an aversion to general ideas, but from an instinctive coupling of idea and illustration; the idea, for a born storyteller, can only be expressed imbedded in its circumstantial illustration. The myth, the parable, the fable are the fountainhead of all fiction and in them is seen most clearly the didactic, moralizing, employment of a story. Modern taste shrinks from emphasizing the central idea that hides behind the fiction, but it exists there nevertheless, supplying the unity to fantasizing, and offering a justification to what otherwise we would repudiate as mere arbitrary contrivance, pretentious lying, or individualistic emotional association-spinning. For all their magnificent intellectual endowment, George Meredith and George Eliot were not born storytellers; they chose fiction as the vehicle for their reflections, and the passing of time is revealing their error in that choice. Jane Austen was pure storyteller and her works are outlasting those of apparently more formidable rivals.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder (1897-1975), “Some Thoughts on Playwriting” (1941), reprinted in American Characteristics and Other Essays, edited by Donald Gallup (1979)

Quote of the Day (Laura Lippman, on Fiction Detailed About Work and Place)

“I like books steeped in the quotidian — details about work and place. You can learn how to run a chicken-and-waffle restaurant by reading ‘Mildred Pierce.’ And I like fiction about money. I wish there were more novels inspired by the economy, from the micro (Jess Walter’s ‘The Financial Lives of the Poets’ and Eliot Perlman’s ‘Three Dollars’) to the macro (John Lanchester’s ‘Capital,’ Adam Haslett’s ‘Union Atlantic’). I am leery of writers who are too in love with their protagonists and assemble choruses of secondary characters to sing their praises. She’s so beautiful! She’s so smart! Nancy Drew is a prime example, but it happens in literary fiction too.”—American crime fiction writer Laura Lippman, “Laura Lippman: By the Book,” The New York Times Book Review, February 16, 2014

(Photo of Laura Lippman taken at the 2015 Library of Congress National Book Festival, Sept. 6, 2015, by fourandsixty.)

Quote of the Day (Jonathan Franzen, on Fiction)

“Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance.” —American novelist Jonathan Franzen, Freedom: A Novel (2010)

Quote of the Day (Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, on the ‘Big Overlap Between Fiction and Song’)

“I've been writing songs since age 15, and for me there's always been a big overlap between fiction and song. My style as a novelist comes substantially from what I learnt writing songs. The intimate, first-person quality of a singer performing to an audience, for instance, carried over for me into novels. As did the need to approach meaning subtly, sometimes by nudging it into the spaces between the lines. You have to do that all the time when writing lyrics for someone to sing.” — Japanese-born British Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day), interviewed for “By the Book,” The New York Times Book Review, Mar. 8, 2015

Quote of the Day (Joyce Carol Oates, Imagining the Climate-Change Apocalypse)

“When they moved from West Seventy-Eighth street and Columbus Avenue to Hazelton-on-Hudson, in 1991, the air in the Hudson Valley was cleaner, the sky was a brighter and clearer blue–Luce is certain. The white oaks and birches did not shed their leaves prematurely, in September. That maddening chemical odor wasn't borne on the wind, and the soil on Vedders Hill seemed more solid, substantial. Mudslides were unknown, as were firestorms. An excess of pollen was a far more serious problem than a depletion of ozone was. True, there were reports of acid rain in the Adirondacks, and the Hudson River had been heavily polluted, like Lakes Ontario and Erie, upstate, but the media didn't make a fuss over it, and social media, that vehicle for channelling outrage, did not yet exist. Everyone sailed, canoed, kayaked on the Hudson River. Fished! The river's steely beauty prevailed.” — Joyce Carol Oates, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” The New Yorker, Oct. 14, 2019

This past weekend, on Meet the Press, the panelists, asked to list the most important stories of the last decade, named climate change as number two. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who listed it as number one, explained her reasoning: “What are they going to say 50 years from now? And am I going to be right, 50 years from now?...If we're not taking a leadership role in this, the generations to come will know that we failed.”

That failure hangs heavily over “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which takes its title from the infamous 1741 sermon by Jonathan Edwards sermon. But, while the Congregationalist minister conjured up a personal and collective calling to account for assorted sins, the prolific fiction writer Joyce Carol Oates imagines an environmental catastrophe visited upon her characters, Luce and Andrew.

Not only is the circle of friends of this New York couple decimated by cancers before their time, but the two of them, gripped by confusion, anxiety and fear, grow more emotionally distant from each other, unable to express their emotions to each other. At the climax of the story, death is present not only outside the couple’s home, in the form of a raging firestorm, but inside, through the stricken fellow musicians in Luce’s “Little Quartet”: “Wheelchairs, walkers, canes. Little knitted caps on (bald) heads. A contingent of chemotherapy’s walking wounded.”

“Accusing others of ‘catastrophizing,’ even as the world is disintegrating and one’s own health has become tenuous, is a form of denial in which most/many of us indulge daily,” Oates explained in an interview with The New Yorker. Through fiction, she brings readers face to face with our ongoing individual and collective failure of environmental responsibility. 

The astonishingly prolific Oates has occasionally written horror stories, but I can’t imagine that she has written anything more terrifying than this grim tale. It gives powerful narrative form to the epic ecological change noted by J. R. McNeill in Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century: 

“With our new powers we banished some historical constraints on health and population, food production, energy use, and consumption generally….[I]n  banishing them we invited other constraints in the form of the planet's capacity to absorb the wastes, by-products, and impacts of our actions. These latter constraints had pinched occasionally in the past, but only locally. By the end of the twentieth century they seemed to restrict our options globally.”

(Photograph of Ms. Oates ©Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 4.0 at the 2014 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, Oct. 25, 2014.)

Quote of the Day (Indie Auteur John Sayles, on the Difference Between Film and Fiction)

“A script is to a movie as a blueprint is to a building. So many of the things that will later be major, visceral aspects of the storytelling — cinematography, music, sound effects, costume, performance, the rhythm of the editing — are only just indicated or assumed, and will be realized by a team of talented collaborators. The fiction writer has to serve all those functions alone, with his prose, selecting information so a handful of notes let readers hear the symphony. A screenwriter creates potential — a novelist has to fulfill it.”—Indie screenwriter-director-actor John Sayles (The Return of the Secaucus Seven, Eight Men Out), quoted in “Up Front,” The New York Times Book Review, Oct. 2, 2011

Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Hardwick, on Time and the Novel)

“Time: this is what the novel asks of the writer and the reader. And time is just what our contemporary existence is determined to shorten. So much of our homely, domestic technology is meant to make things go faster, the human effort shorter. And it is curious that saving time at one point does not make one ready to give it at another. Quite the contrary. If the laundry washes and dries quickly, the grateful housewife does not then think that she will give to the dishes the time left over from the quickened wash: no, she demands instantly that the dishes keep pace with the laundry. But it is really a more subtle time the novel depends on. A spiritual and intellectual lengthening, extending like a dream in which much is surrendered and slowly transformed. Perhaps it is the fear that something has happened to time, some change has taken place, which makes us wonder if a new generation will always be there to read the novels, particularly the novels of the past. The terms of the contract between the author and the reader are severe, the demands are serious. Frequently we hear the doleful warning of a retreat on the part of the reader, a withdrawal of attention, an indifference to the august tradition that stands there like so many stone and marble college buildings, ready for parody or destruction.”—American essayist-novelist Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007), “Reflections on Fiction,” The New York Review of Books, Feb. 13, 1969