## Metadata - Author: [[Madison Smartt Bell]] - Full Title: Narrative Design - Category: #books ## Highlights - Fiction workshops are inherently almost incapable of recognizing success. The fiction workshop is designed to be a fault-finding mechanism; its purpose is to diagnose and prescribe. ([Location 275](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005N1C7JI&location=275)) - The composition of fiction can, at least theoretically, be broken into two stages. First, and most important, comes imagination. Next is rendering. Imagination is no more or less than a highly structured form of daydreaming. Daydreaming is fun, a form of play. Once the people, the places, the events you are imagining become fully present to your senses, then it’s time for rendering. The left-brain homunculus must go to work to express your vision in language. But the problem has been made much easier because it is no longer a task of creating a separate reality constructed of words, but only of describing what your inner eye has seen. For an experienced writer on a good day, the synapse between imagination and reading fires so rapidly as to be imperceptible; conception and realization are one. Ultimately, you have to believe. If it is not real for you, you cannot talk about it persuasively. Because the writing of fiction is all about producing an illusion, it’s all-important that you believe in the illusion absolutely. You will never fool anyone else if you can’t fool yourself. All the rest is craftsmanship. ([Location 528](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005N1C7JI&location=528)) - As Norman Mailer once put it, the main difference between an experienced and an inexperienced writer is the ability to work on a bad day. ([Location 539](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005N1C7JI&location=539)) - Once you have crossed the river into language, there is virtually no way to ever get back. For a writer, this is a peculiarly frustrating state of affairs, because language, as a left-brain project, is ipso facto an inhibitor of the imagination and of the unconscious mind. Language is the material with which you must make the work, and yet (because language inhibits the freest forms of creativity) this material works against you. You know that there is still a vast prelinguistic or nonlinguistic region of your being, where sound is clearer and color is brighter, where all experience is primary, but it is very very difficult to reach that place again. There is the realm of essences; new meanings are being formed there all the time, but as a writer, you can’t express those meanings wordlessly. You run your head against that paradox every day. ([Location 584](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005N1C7JI&location=584)) - We are all continually in the process of learning to apprehend narrative structures, in their integrity and in their best possible wholeness. That apprehension is both the value and the pleasure of reading; it’s also the process whereby we try to make sense of the events and images of our own lives. ([Location 691](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005N1C7JI&location=691))