## Metadata - Author: [[Samuel R. Delany, Matthew Cheney (Contributor)]] - Full Title: The Jewel-Hinged Jaw - Category: #books ## Highlights - the construction of these violent nets of wonder called speculative fiction. ([Location 781](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0054RSHC2&location=781)) - I have read many descriptions of “mystical experiences”—many in SF stories and novels. Very, very few have generated any feel of the mystical—which is to say that as the writers went about setting correction after correction, the images were too untrustworthy to call up any personal feelings about such experiences. The Symbolists have a lesson here: the only thing that we will trust enough to let it generate in us any real sense of the mystical is a resonant aesthetic form. ([Location 806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0054RSHC2&location=806)) - the Plot I distrust the term “plot” (not to mention “theme” and “setting”) in discussions of writing: It (and they) refer to an effect a story produces in the reading. But writing is an internal process writers go through (or put themselves through) in front of a blank paper that leaves a detritus of words there. The truth is, practically nothing is known about it. Talking about plot, or theme, or setting to a beginning writer is like giving the last three years’ movie reviews from the Sunday Times to a novice filmmaker. A camera manual, a few pamphlets on matched action, viable cutting points, and perhaps one on lighting (in the finished film, the viewer hardly ever sees the light sources, so the reviewer can hardly discuss them; but their placement is essential to everything from mood to plain visibility) would be more help. In short, a vocabulary that has grown from a discussion of effects is only of limited use in a discussion of causes. ([Location 1163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0054RSHC2&location=1163)) - Writers work with the story process in different ways. Some writers like to work through a short story at a single, intense sitting, to interrupt as little as possible the energy that propels the process along, to keep the imagined visualization clearly and constantly in mind. Other writers must pause, pace, and sometimes spend days between each few phrases, abandoning and returning to the visualization a dozen times a page. I think this is done as a sort of test, to make sure only the strongest and most vitally clear elements—the ones that cling tenaciously to the underside of memory—are retained. Masterpieces have been written with both methods. Both methods have produced drivel. ([Location 1283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0054RSHC2&location=1283)) - The other type of symbolism is “intensive” (or Dionysian, to use Nietzsche’s more familiar terminology) symbolism. This is the sort used by most of the symbolistes Symons wrote of: Rimbaud, Verlaine, de Nerval, and Baudelaire. By an intensification of language, the writer represents his situations more vividly than life itself, in an attempt to capture some experiential richness that is usually only perceived with hindsight or in anticipation, and, rarely, in moments of total involvement. ([Location 1402](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0054RSHC2&location=1402)) - Science fiction is the only area of literature outside poetry that is symbolistic in its basic conception. Its stated aim is to represent the world without reproducing it. That is what dealing with worlds of possibilities and probabilities means. ([Location 1418](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0054RSHC2&location=1418))