Delphinium Books

Offering readers the best in quality literature

  • Home
  • About
  • Our Books
  • Blog
  • Submissions
  • Contact
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

Are Other Writers Good Company?

August 2, 2017

In the Company of Writers

In The Company of WritersPatricia Highsmith avoided the company of other writers; she felt there was little chance of hearing a good, usable anecdote. Writers, she said, are generally careful to guard any good material for their own use.

Highsmith, a maverick novelist who wrote suspenseful books that were as richly layered as any of her more literary contemporaries, astutely recognized a conundrum that threatens any serious writer contemplating their own – as opposed to researched – material: to be able to leave the familiar world of self-preoccupation to attain the necessary degree of objectivity to write convincingly. This means, of course, being able to imagine what the world might look like from a point of view very different from one’s own; this, after all, is the defining act of what we call “imagination.”

“Self-preoccupation” may sound snarky and judgmental, but actually it is a necessary state of writerly being. After all, what would drive someone to spend years composing a book of a modest length that for many more prolific, popular writers might take months? Surely contentment, satisfaction, happiness would deter such a single-minded effort that might delay its creator from getting any gratification from seeing it out in the world. Serious writers write, not about how blissful their lives are, but rather out of some kind of pain or as the result of what they believe to be their own (or someone close to them) unjust placement in the world.

To write well one has to achieve a degree of objectivity, particularly if one is writing autobiographically. To write well means sounding the depth of one’s emotions, but then rising from that depth high enough to get an overview. Highsmith well knew that the extraordinary sensitivity that writers need to fuel their work can be easily turned in the wrong direction so that they falsely believe their own state of mind reflects the larger world. And this is why we’ve heard many stories about writers creating great laudable works of literature that, one would imagine, had once granted them tremendous satisfaction, then embarking on a path of self-destruction. There are many names that come to mind: suffice to say that the majority of American born Nobel-prize winners were incurable alcoholics.

Highsmith probably came to feel the way she did as the result of meeting too many other writers whose understandable inner struggling made them less than companionable. She knew that whether they were holding court or keeping to themselves, they were studiously avoiding speaking about subjects and stories about which non-writers would be a lot more easily forthcoming.

Filed Under: General

Recent Posts

  • On the Line Between Memory and Invention Lies the Story by Kimberly Olson Fakih December 11, 2022
  • Six Thoughts on Historical Fiction by Don Zancanella, author of A Storm in the Stars August 8, 2022
  • Seeing Red – an essay by Margaret Hermes, author of The Opposite of Chance (available in paperback March 2022) April 20, 2022
  • In the Shadows of The Unknown Woman by Brooks Hansen October 18, 2021
  • Thoughts On Writing IN THE FIELD By Rachel Pastan August 3, 2021
  • Old Enough to Have Succeeded, but Also to Have Failed: on writing the short stories You Would Have Told Me Not To by Chris Coake available in paperback July 27, 2021 July 26, 2021

Categories

  • Delphinium Authors
  • General
  • New Books
  • News

Tags

1954 acceptance speech artists Austria autobiographical Books Booz Allen Hamilton bottoming out celebrity demotic Dostoyevsky dysfunctional Edward Snowden fame fiction fiction-writing Fitgerald Fuhrer George Elliot Germany Hemingway Historical Fiction holocaust imagination James Frey Jewish Karen Silkwood literature Memoir memoirist Middlemarch Nabokov Nazi Nazis Nobel Prize novelist novelists NSA Reading redemption Sobibor style World War II writers writing

Archives

  • December 2022
  • August 2022
  • April 2022
  • October 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2019
  • April 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • August 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • October 2013

© 2023 · Delphinium Books. All rights reserved.