## Metadata - Author: [[Graham Swift]] - Full Title: Making an Elephant - Category: #books ## Highlights - Fiction is also a kind of inoculation, a vaccine, preserving us from such plagues as reality can breed. But, like all true vaccines, it will work only if it contains a measure of the plague itself, a tincture of the thing it confronts. ([Location 112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DO17PS&location=112)) - There can even be something magical about the perfectly judged and timed revelation on the page of an unanswerable truth we already inwardly acknowledge. ([Location 139](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DO17PS&location=139)) - The word ‘influence’ itself is misleading. It assumes that one writer’s writing can directly shape and inform another’s, as it can, but surely the most important influences aren’t influences in this sense at all. They are those other writers who, though they may not leave on you any stylistic mark, yet ignite or reignite your simple desire to write. ([Location 156](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DO17PS&location=156)) - And this was perhaps the nub of my fear about my ambition: I knew I wasn’t a natural writer. If I were, I’d already be a writer; there’d be no question of becoming one. The only way I could be a writer would be by making myself one, by squeezing the writer out of me. By work. And I was afraid of that work and of perhaps discovering there was no writer there. ([Location 266](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DO17PS&location=266)) - ‘no iron can pierce the heart with such force as a full stop in the right place’. ([Location 276](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DO17PS&location=276)) - Writers should count themselves lucky: merely to have their self-induced immurements, their self-imposed immersions. ([Location 611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DO17PS&location=611)) - Life offers us very few, if any, moments of real ‘arrival’, when we know that we’ve entered a domain that, however fragile our presentiments of it, however unfamiliar it may seem and however awkwardly we actually make our entrance, is yet where we belong: moments of arrival that are also moments of release. ([Location 617](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DO17PS&location=617)) - Even telling stories is a kind of superstition, an imposing of extra structure on reality. ([Location 776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DO17PS&location=776)) - All you can do in life is make something, and in so far as superstition is creative it’s perhaps no bad thing. ([Location 777](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DO17PS&location=777)) - I feel that a lot of my instincts and intuitions about writing are in fact musical, and I don’t think that writing and music are fundamentally so far apart. The basic elements of narrative—timing, pacing, flow, recapitulation, tension and release—are musical ones too. And where would writing be without rhythm, the large rhythms that shape a story, or the small ones that shape a paragraph? I increasingly feel too that writing isn’t about words in themselves, but about getting words to register and vibrate to things that might lie beyond them or just at their edge. Thus the spaces between and around words can have their unspoken resonances. And what else is music but a communication without words, in which the silences count as much as the notes? ([Location 941](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DO17PS&location=941)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - In the misty and often lengthy periods which I later come to realize are the preludes to my starting a new book, I’ve noticed that my reading can shift from novels, or anything large, to poetry, as if I’m aware that whatever I do next will arise not from any grand design but from some small, insistent vibration; a blink of light through the fog. ([Location 2293](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DO17PS&location=2293)) - And what else is the imagination than a means of mental transport by which we can move from familiar to unfamiliar territory? ([Location 2782](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DO17PS&location=2782)) - There’s one place, I’d like to suggest, which belongs peculiarly to fiction, to all good storytelling, while belonging to us all. You don’t have to have been born in the Fens, or ever have gone there, in order to read a novel that’s set there. It’s the job of the novel to take you there. I think we all recognize as readers the often rather delicious sensation, as we begin a novel, of entering a previously unfamiliar world and of starting to inhabit it as if it were our own. And we all recognize that much more intense and resonant thrill a novel can give when something in the narrative or in the internal workings of a character makes us stop in our mental tracks and say to ourselves, ‘Hold on—I’ve been here too. I’ve been in this place too. It’s unfamiliar, but it’s not.’ It’s surely this ‘I’ve-been-here-too’ territory with its countless possible external approaches but its common centre of identification which is the real heartland of fiction, the real destination of storytelling. ([Location 2886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DO17PS&location=2886)) - If we are all, at least in our minds, travellers, if to write or to read a book is to go on a mental journey, then it is also true that books themselves travel. One proof of this is that books get translated, something which could hardly happen if the experience being purveyed could not be recognized and felt to be true in more than one place. ([Location 2899](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DO17PS&location=2899)) - I think if you start a story that’s going to go anywhere, you have to involve yourself, from the outset, in a kind of inner uprooting; you have to become, with all its freedom, risk and excitement, unattached. I think all writers, whether they’re of the settled, the nomadic or the involuntarily displaced kind, would recognize that mental dislocation is part and parcel of what they do. It’s even what initiates and inspires what they do. I’ve always thought that all narrative starts with the sense of the strange—a strangeness that may be no more, or less, than the sudden appreciation of specialness, of that humble glory of our irreplaceable place in time. ([Location 2912](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DO17PS&location=2912)) - Stories begin when strangeness slips into our lives, as it always will and must, because life is, however much we try to domesticate it, constantly, wonderfully, dangerously strange. ([Location 2921](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DO17PS&location=2921)) - Analogies for how writing gets written can be stretched, but there is some basis in the piscatorial one, in that concentrated dealing with surface and depth, never knowing from one moment to the next what might, if anything, be there, sometimes having a guess, always a hope, sometimes an entirely irrational but palpable anticipation, and sometimes being taken totally by surprise. With salmon and sea-trout fishing the analogy gets closer, if only because it enters realms of greater mystery. Unlike the permanent residents, the migratory fish which move up a river only at certain times and in certain conditions feed hardly at all, so to fish for them lacks even the fragile logic of presenting the quarry with something imitating its food. No one really knows why salmon and sea trout ever take a fly, though they’re more likely to be there and do so at certain times and a whole body of fishing lore has tried to reduce this to a precise science—or art—and failed. It’s the enigma of the ‘take’ rather than the general confrontation of mind and water which most parallels—without in the least explaining—the creative process. And in salmon and sea-trout fishing it’s the take, not the capture, which is the essential, heart-stopping thing. Sometimes it comes with a long, powerful, unmistakably connective pull, sometimes there’s a boil and a white slash of spray, but when it happens it’s always a sheer amazement. And it’s not at all unlike how an idea—that limp word we use for want of a better one—bursts, without recognizable correlation to design, effort or receptivity, upon a writer’s mind. In both cases exultation can be immediately mixed with high anxiety as to whether fish and angler, idea and writer, will part company. ([Location 3039](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DO17PS&location=3039))