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New PDF release: Stranger at the Door: Writers and the Act of Writing

By Kristjana Gunnars

ISBN-10: 0889204551

ISBN-13: 9780889204553

ISBN-10: 1417563184

ISBN-13: 9781417563180

in the beginning of a brand new writing project—whether it’s the 1st web page of a brand new novel or a much less formidable undertaking, writers frequently adventure excitement, worry, or dread. For Kristjana Gunnars, the decision of a brand new undertaking is “like an individual you don’t understand knocking in your door—you both decide to allow the individual in or no longer. It’s either intriguing and hazardous to begin a brand new manuscript.” This publication is an engagement with that “stranger” referred to as writing.

inventive or resourceful writing is a posh procedure that contains greater than mind by myself. Writers utilize every little thing: their sensibilities, historical past, tradition, wisdom, adventure, schooling, or even their biology. those essays search out, and assemble right into a dialogue, what writers have stated approximately their very own reports in writing. even though the writers are from world wide and of very diverse backgrounds, the commonality in their comments brings domestic the conclusion that writers in every single place are grappling with comparable problems—with the doubtless basic difficulties of whilst, the place, why, and what to write down, but in addition higher questions equivalent to the connection among author and society, or problems with privateness, appropriation, or homelessness. whereas none of those questions will be definitively replied, they are often fruitfully mentioned.

Originating as questions posed in creative-writing seminars, those essays have grown into better half texts for either writers and readers who are looking to perform a talk approximately what writers do.

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Extra resources for Stranger at the Door: Writers and the Act of Writing

Sample text

Welty spoke of the unfortunate position of the writer in the southern United States who, by virtue of being a white Southerner, is hated by 30 The Diasporic Imagination the rest of the nation on account of the civil rights issue, and has to write in spite of that national dislike. Being hated creates hatred in turn, she says, and the Southerner is “trapped” in “venom,” which is “a devastating emotion” for a writer (155). One response is to elevate the verbal creation, hoping it will bridge political barriers.

The writer has to be removed from her surroundings in order to write in the first place, he maintains. “Certainly literature would never have existed,” he says, “if some human beings had not been strongly inclined to introversion, discontented with the world as it is, inclined to forget themselves for hours and days on end and to fix their gaze on the immobility of silent words” (52). There is no such thing as accuracy of expression, because everyone sees things differently. The best and only thing a writer can do is be true to her own perception, and that requires introspection.

To achieve that airiness, Calvino claims the writer needs to lighten language itself. He wants “a verbal texture that seems weightless” (16). Since literature is also “a search for knowledge” (26), there is ample cause for him to argue that the life of the imagination, of memory, and the construction of a more refined heterocosm is more durable and more real than “the privation actually suffered” (27). In other words, the life of the imagination becomes more real than phenomenal reality itself.

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Stranger at the Door: Writers and the Act of Writing by Kristjana Gunnars


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