It is February 5th and I have come to the residency late because (apologies) I have been promoting a novel—an activity that includes explaining my motives, naming my influences, answering questions about family, and trying to look plucky as I stand before a photographer with a parrot on my shoulder. Should I use this residency as a chance to promote my novel some more? I prefer to run from myself, screaming.
This month I am going to share some sentences I’ve collected over the years in my notebooks—sentences not written by me, sentences I hope NF’s readers will find interesting, agreeable, or useful. I’m taking W.H. Auden’s Commonplace Book as a model—except that I neither arrange my quotations under alphabetical headings, nor append my own commentary.
I begin with three quotations on failure—a consoling subject for any writer!
“Failure is a mystery, not a problem. Of course this means not that we should try to fail, or take masochistic delights in mistakes, but that we should see the mystery of incarnation at play whenever our work doesn’t measure up to our expectations. If we could understand the feelings of inferiority and humbling occasioned by failure as meaningful in their own right, then we might incorporate failure into our work so that it doesn’t literally devastate us.”
— Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul
+
“I always think of myself as working at a rock face. Ninety days out of ninety-five, it’s just a rock face. The other five days, there’s a bit of silver, a bit of base metal in it. I’m reasonably consistent, and the consistency is a help to me. It helps me to stay in contact with my failure rate, and unless you have a failure rate that vastly exceeds your success rate, you’re really not in touch with what you’re doing as a poet. The danger of inspiration is that it is a theory that redirects itself towards the idea of success rather than to the idea of consistent failure. And all poets need to have a sane and normalized relationship with their failure rate.”
— Eavan Boland, Sleeping with Monsters
+
“I’m not sure I understand the process of writing. There is, I’m sure, something strange about imaginative concentration. The brain slowly begins to function in a different way, to make mysterious connections. Say, it is Monday, and you write a very bad draft, but if you keep trying, on Friday, words, phrases, appear almost unexpectedly. I don’t know why you can’t do it on Monday, or why I can’t. I’m the same person, no smarter, I have nothing more at hand . . . . It’s one of the things writing students don’t understand. They write a first draft and are quite disappointed, or often should be disappointed. They don’t understand that they have merely begun, and that they may be merely beginning even in the second or third draft.”
— Elizabeth Hardwick, Paris Review Interviews