A Quote by Derek Walcott
Minor writers think style is all.
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Let's stop reflexively comparing Chinese writers to Chinese writers, Indian writers to Indian writers, black writers to black writers. Let's focus on the writing itself: the characters, the language, the narrative style.
I think the best writers are voracious readers who pick up the cadences and the feel of narration through a number of different books. And you begin by maybe copying the style of writers that really knocked you out.
I don’t think writers compete, I think they’re all doing separate things in their own style.
I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.
I thought that, post-apartheid, there would be absolutely no interest in South Africa. That has been both true and untrue. The major writers like Gordimer and Coetzee have produced major books. But some of the more minor writers have drifted away.
I think all writers have a style, a particular voice and rhythm that you have to find.
Of course, every artist has 'minor works' that they do, but I don't think I have any 'minor disciplines.' Each discipline I approach as a major undertaking that I put my whole self into.
Nick Flynn is another writer I admire - his fragmented sections, his playfulness with genre, his urgency. The palette in his work is his style, a voice that is singular, and that's what I think writers should strive for, to have a style and a voice that is only theirs.
The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.
Except in the rare cases of great dynamic thinkers whose thoughts are as turning-points in the history of our race, it is by Style that writers gain distinction, by Style they secure their immortality.
I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
Minor sports in the community is fun and recreation for everyone, not just the elite. I think back to my days in minor hockey and those are my fondest memories, having fun.
Nothing is a hobby - each discipline is its own world with its own high standards. Of course, every artist has 'minor works' that they do, but I don't think I have any 'minor disciplines.'
In animation, you may be working with 20 writers, and everybody has to write the same thing. You can't have episodes that don't feel like they belong. In comics, you're gonna write a whole run, which means it's your style that's coming through. But when you're working on a show that's collaborated with a dozen other writers, you have to have a style that blends the show together. So you can't write it the way you normally would, because your script will stand out from all the others.
There are, occasionally, writers who are able to combine both story and style. They are, of course, the best. You get a spectacular view and you also get to look at it from the backseat of a chauffeur-driven Cadillac. In the field of fantasy, those writers able to combine story-as-narration with story-as-style are even rarer. But there are a few...the late Theodore Sturgeon, the early Ray Bradbury...and Richard Christian Matheson. A brilliant chip off the old block.
The original sense of the word 'influence' is 'to flow into.' For the most part, these writers that I admire... their style flows into me without my intervention, which is what explains the broad range of writers who I've been compared with; it reflects my reading.
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