Peter Turchi, A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic
This is a sequel to Maps of the Imagination — instead of looking at writing as map-making, Turchi looks at writing as puzzle-making.
On re-reading:
The best stories and novels lead the reader not to an explanation, but to a place of wonder. How do we know that? Because the books and stories and poems that mean the most to us are the ones we want to read again, to reexperience and reconsider.
On making lots of time for revision:
We need to allow ourselves to pursue hunches, to discover, in the words of Robert Sternberg, nonobvious pieces of information and, even more important, nonobvious relationships between new information and information already in our memory…. [W]e need to give ourselves time to make images and move them around inside our heads, and on paper, in new arrangements.
On Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” for writers:
If we never felt pleasure from anything we wrote, we’d stop; but if we were completely satisfied, if we didn’t feel the urge to move beyond what we have accomplished or to take on a new challenge, we’d lose interest…
Filed under: my reading year 2015
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