The task is not primarily to have a story, but to penetrate the story, to discard the elements … - Deborah Eisenberg

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It is a fact worth pondering that four centuries ago the evil of "an abundance or surplus" arose from its being kept off the market, while today the evil of surplus lies in its being thrown upon the market.

Deborah Eisenberg

The task is not primarily to have a story, but to penetrate the story, to discard the elements of it that are merely shell, or husk, that give apparent form to the story, but actually obscure the essence. In other words, the problem is to transcend the givens of a narrative.

Essence, Giving, Tasks, Give, Penetrate

Same Author Quotes

You write something and there’s no reality to it. You can’t inject it with any kind of reality. You have to be patient and keep going, and then, one day, you can feel something signaling to you from the innermost recesses. Like a little person trapped under the rubble of an earthquake. And very, very, very slowly you find your way toward the little bit of living impulse.

Writing, Reality, Earthquakes, Inject, Signaling, Innermost

Her professors were astonished by her leaps of thought, by the finesse and elegance of her insights. She arrived at hypotheses by sheer intuition and with what eventually one of her mentors described as an almost alarming speed; she was like a dancer, he said, out in the cosmos springing weightlessly from star to star. Drones, merely brilliant, crawled along behind with laborious proofs that supported her assertions.

Stars, Dancer, Intuition, Finesse, Leaps

Whether it is done quickly or slowly, however splendid the results, the process of writing fiction is inherently, inevitably, indistinguishable from wasting time.

Writing, Fiction, Done, Indistinguishable, Inherently

Nothing is more fortifying than learning that you have a real reader, a reader who truly responds both accurately and actively. It gives you courage, and you feel, I can crawl out on the branch a little further. It’s going to hold.

Real, Giving, Branches, Hold, Courage

Every moment is all the things that have happened before and all the things that are going to happen, and. . . the way all those things look at one point on their way along a line.

Line, Lines, Look, Looks, Things, Way