## Metadata - Author: [[Richard Rhodes]] - Full Title: How to Write - Category: #books ## Highlights - silence is pain that writing relieves. Our uniqueness isolates us. Writing, we make our way out of our isolation onto the commons that we share. It’s an emotional experience. You stumble gibbering into the valley of the shadow; you pull yourself hand over hand to ecstatic heights. Beyond those terrific passages gathers the community of readers, an open, world community of people—men, women, and children—who want and need to hear. ([Location 61](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=61)) - the process of writing is always a healing process because the function of creation is always, always, the alleviation of pain—the writer’s, first of all, and then the pain of those who read what she has written. Imagination is compassionate. Writing is a form of making, and making humanizes the world.1 ([Location 98](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=98)) - Imagination, an ancient human invention, is a virtual-reality process, with the disadvantage that everyone has to make up the virtual reality on his own. Writing is a recording system that allows imagination to share its virtual treasures. What do you make when you write? Writing makes virtual reality inside readers’ heads. ([Location 366](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=366)) - the best modern poetry is so dense with fresh (and therefore unfamiliar) language that it’s extremely demanding to read. Most of us aren’t trained to such rigors. Nor does poetry fit the system most busy readers have organized for themselves of factual reading for work and citizenship, and narrative fiction, usually genre, for entertainment. ([Location 396](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=396)) - If I were teaching a writing course, I’d require my students to read scientific papers as well as other examples of exceptional prose; they’re the best training I know in rigorous argument, a skill every writer can use. ([Location 416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=416)) - (“Natural” is a hopeless word; it has always meant and continues to mean whatever the speaker wants to exclude from discussion. Ernest Rutherford said that whenever he heard one of his students use the word “universe” he threw him out of the laboratory. I feel the same way about the meaningless word “natural.”) ([Location 644](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=644)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - I knew the book I was starting to write would be a long book, although I never imagined it would finish out at nearly nine hundred pages. I had come to think of the story I was about to tell, which I had researched exhaustively for six years, as the tragic epic of the twentieth century. Its theme, worthy of Milton, was “Humankind invents the means of its own destruction.” I needed a narrative voice that could tell such a story with authority (more authority than I felt personally, since I had only one college physics course to my name). Such a voice was available in the Anglo-American tradition of historical narrative, in which I had been schooled as a history major; Edward Gibbon used it most notably for his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I wanted to avail myself of that tradition but warm it up. To warm my narrative was largely a matter of deciding to tell the story as a group biography of the several hundred extraordinary human beings who caused it to happen. ([Location 814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=814)) - I could have started so complex a story almost anywhere; but a man stepping off a curb is a human and engaging place to begin. (All stories are ultimately the same story: someone falls into a hole and has to find a way to get out.) ([Location 838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=838)) - Whatever the authority of facts, everyone does research to prepare for writing, even writers of fiction, even poets, even if the only library they consult is memory. You can’t write without it. If writing is the construction of virtual realities, you have to get the reality right or the illusion falls apart. ([Location 908](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=908)) - Some of the charm of the past consists of the quiet—the great distracting buzz of implication has stopped and we are left only with what has been fully phrased and precisely stated. And part of the melancholy of the past comes from our knowledge that the huge, unrecorded hum and buzz of implication was once there and left no trace—we feel that because it is evanescent it is especially human. We feel, too, that the truth of the great preserved monuments of the past does not fully appear without it. From letters and diaries, from the remote, unconscious corners of the great works themselves, we try to guess what the sound of the multifarious implication was and what it meant.1 ([Location 925](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=925)) - “People seem not to see,” writes Emerson, “that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.” ([Location 1032](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=1032)) - Truman Capote claimed to have trained himself to remember up to four hours’ interviewing word for word, a skill he cultivated so that he could interview the imprisoned murderers of In Cold Blood without spooking them. I believe him. More than once I’ve run to my rental car and disgorged whole conversations onto tape. David Halberstam, who often pursues people who don’t want to talk and won’t talk where a record is being kept, does interviews that way. It helps if you know your subject. Then statements made in interviews fit into slots in a familiar framework. That’s the way waiters remember twelve orders around a table without writing them down: by attaching you and your order mentally to objects in a familiar landscape. Harry Gold, an American chemist who served as a courier for Soviet atomic espionage during the Second World War, recalled his hundreds of rendezvous so minutely that skeptics accused him of making them up. The truth is, he was a sports fanatic; he remembered espionage dates so well because he keyed them to sporting events. ([Location 1129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=1129)) - Once I did the necessary research for an article, structure almost always emerged in the struggle to write the first paragraph—not surprising, since voice and structure are united as trunk and crown. Then the story foliated, usually without complication. ([Location 1586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=1586)) - Editing isn’t a cosmetic process. It’s a thinking process. Expression usually emerges from the preconscious mind only loosely organized. Images body forth; memories, ideas, associations, tumble onto the page. The hound dog of memory that you send out for language retrieves the first quarry it finds in the quarter where you aimed it. Sometimes it offers up the right word, sometimes it offers up a remote third cousin, sometimes a dead fish. Not to decorate an infelicitous choice, not to “use the active voice” or to obey other stylistic edicts but to make as clear as you can, to yourself and to your reader, what you “mean,” you have to edit. ([Location 1645](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=1645)) - You can’t ever say only what you mean. You always say more as well. The purpose of editing is to localize and fix your meaning more precisely—for yourself first of all and then for your reader. The purpose of editing is to make as certain as humanly possible that the more you always say also says what you mean. ([Location 1656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=1656)) - But you don’t want people to write their stories into your work, to find patterns that aren’t there. You want people to read your stories, to find the patterns you designed. ([Location 1674](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=1674)) - Few magazines pay more than a dollar a word, a payment base that hasn’t changed much over the years, probably because there’s always a pool of talented, eager younger writers willing to work for less than established writers can afford. (A magazine article seldom takes less than a month of hard work, often two or three.) ([Location 2213](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=2213)) - “A unification of fact and value” is an excellent definition, it seems to me, of any given word in any given language. So words bloom into novels (or verities), and the large problem grows out of the small: to assemble words so they work together with something approaching the same force of unified fact and value that each word has accrued in its long, accumulating passage through history. Words are the model, words are the tools, words are the boards, words are the nails. ([Location 2427](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=2427)) - Structures of meaning larger and more diffuse than words also loom up and have to be confronted when you prepare to write. The last thing I know, when I finish writing a book, is why I really wrote it. Then I see that it elaborates on something personal, usually something from childhood. ([Location 2431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=2431)) - Writing is always like scuba diving, a descent as deep as you can or dare to go, given your capacity and your level of skill, into a medium that grades from emerald clarity into fathomless darkness and propagates out and on deeper and farther than you or anyone or all of us together can ever dive. ([Location 2764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=2764)) - We are no more divided from the world than the water itself is divided. When we damage the world we damage ourselves. If we destroy it we destroy ourselves. A piece at a time, we think, a part at a time, but the world has no pieces and does not come apart. Wherever we put our hands, points of energy trail off from us like the tails of comets. The tree that falls without sound falls within our hearing.19 ([Location 2772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=2772)) - Writing goes everywhere. How wonderful that it should. ([Location 2776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=2776)) - Most of us sustain continuity within ourselves—continuity of identity—automatically, as automatically as we balance ourselves walking, by a kind of psychic homeostasis. Sometimes—usually when we’re hit with emotional or cultural shocks—we have to intervene in the process more consciously. By grieving, by introspecting, through dark nights of the soul and new days dawning, we incorporate the unsettling experiences and reassemble ourselves. Sustaining continuity in a work requires the same strategies as sustaining continuity within yourself. ([Location 2810](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=2810)) - You need bottom to persevere in writing. It’s difficult work, and you can’t fully master it at school. Even now, all these books and articles later, writing often feels to me like groping in darkness along a wall. It should; it’s sensory thought pushed through an abstract transformation, and no one ever said thinking of any kind was easy. ([Location 2876](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=2876)) - Evolution has taken about four billion years to write the set of texts we can find in the DNA of creatures alive today. We are about to be able to read them in much the same manner we read any book of our own creating…. Nor is there really any choice in the matter: once we begin to read the book that describes how we ourselves are made, it is unlikely we will stop in the middle….3 One of the best definitions of literature comes from the Italian novelist Italo Calvino; in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino tried to characterize the essence of great literature. His prescription for the literature of the twenty-first century included five qualities: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. As it happens, the genome of a person has all of these qualities in abundance. It is light because it is as small as the rigors of natural selection permit. It is quick because it must be: the life of a cell is short, and the entire text of the genome must be copied in a few hours; in the case of an embryo, the genomic text must make a person ready for the world—starting from a single cell—in only a few months. It is exact because its base sequences and the proteins they encode create the specificity of surfaces that gives living things their distinctive complexity and efficiency in a disordered universe. It is visible because cells, the genome’s readers, assemble it into living things from its instructions. But above all, the human genome is multiple. We are different from one another, and this allows the DNA texts within us to carry the infinite multiplicity of possibility in human character, and, most especially, in the hopes we have for our children.4 ([Location 2885](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=2885)) - Beginnings open out and start things going. Endings bring those things to closure. But at another, more symbolic level, endings also open out, into chambers connected to farther chambers, where the reverberations of your story activate universals. They’re often what readers remember most vividly. They’re your last chance to influence your reader before she goes away, back into her life. ([Location 3045](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=3045)) - Every story you and I and the rest of our audacious company write is a further initiation into an ancient and honorable craft, a craft that cuts windows through the terrifying opacity of the world. Endings can also be beginnings. If you want to write, you can. ([Location 3048](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000W917FQ&location=3048)) - Tags: [[writing]]