On Writing Read Online Free PDF Page B

to other subjects it would bring foolishness. In the case of “The Bear” we can assume that to Faulkner the escapement of wild time and place seemed one attribute of the thing he was writing about—the lost attribute, implicit in it, and supplied now, in his story. In letting time and place out of the box he was not, by any standards but our ordinary ones, being reckless. By his own, he was being true, faithful to his composition of the story at hand. There is no other integrity.
    —
    We’ve observed how a story’s great emphasis may fall on any of the things that make it up—on character, on plot, on its physical or moral world, in sensory or symbolic form. Now we may venture to say that it’s this
ordering
of his story that is closest to the writer behind the writing, and that it’s our perception of this ordering that gives us our nearest understanding of him.
    And we have observed that the finest story writers seem to be in one sense obstructionists. As if they held back their own best interests—or what would be in another writer their best interests. It’s a strange thing. And what is stranger is that if we look for the source of the deepest pleasure we receive from a writer, how often do we not find that it seems to be connected with this very obstruction.
    The fact is, apparently, that in pressing to our source of pleasure we have entered into another world. We are speaking of beauty. And beauty is not a blatant or promiscuous or obvious quality; indeed, it is associated with reticence, with stubbornness, of a number of kinds. It arises somehow from a desire not to comply with what may be expected, but to act inevitably, as long as some human truth is in sight, whatever that inevitability may call for. Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.
    Two qualities that cannot be imitated in this life, beauty and sensitivity, may in fiction’s making be related to each other. But, reading and writing, we can only strive for one. Sensitivity in ourselves. And then beauty we may know, when we see it.
    I think it ought to be said that a fiction writer can try anything. He has tried a great deal, but presumably noteverything. The possibilities are endless because the stirring of the imagination never rests, and because we can never stop trying to make feeling felt.
    So we know what will most pertinently describe the writing of our future too. Not rules, not esthetics, not problems and their solutions: not rules so long as there is imagination; not esthetics until after there is passion; not even problems that will always rise again and again for the honest writer. For at the other end of the writing is the reader. There is sure to be somewhere the reader, who is a user himself of imagination and thought, who knows, perhaps, as much about the need of communication as the writer.
    Reader and writer, we wish each other well. Don’t we want and don’t we understand the same thing? A story of beauty and passion, some fresh approximation of human truth?
    1949

W RITING AND A NALYZING
A S TORY
    Writers are often asked to give their own analysis of some story they have published. I never saw, as reader or writer, that a finished story stood in need of any more from the author: for better or worse, there the story is. There is also the question of whether or not the author could provide the sort of analysis asked for. Story writing and critical analysis are indeed separate gifts, like spelling and playing the flute, and the same writer proficient in both has been doubly endowed. But even he can’t rise and do both at the same time.
    To me as a story writer, generalizations about writing come tardily and uneasily, and I would limit them, if I were wise, by saying that any conclusions I feel confidence in are stuck to the particular story, part of the animal. The most trustworthy lesson I’ve learned from work so far is the simple