The Short Story — Deep Work, Patience, + Meditation
In reading Edith Wharton’s The Writing of Fiction, it became clear that she calls, again and again, for the short story writer to think deeply on their story, to be patient with it, to meditate on the subject, form, style, and characters before launching into its telling. The short story requires the writer to know the story inside and out, to know exactly how and why it must be told. The way she writes about it, Wharton seems to see the short story as an act of meditation and deep work, not just on the story being told, but on the person telling it. As she writes early in the book: “One good heart-break will furnish the poet with many songs, and the novelist with a considerable number of novels. But they must have hearts that can break.” And how can we have hearts without deep thought, reflection, and the patience to live the life set before us?
"True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. … Vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer’s own; and the mind which would bring this secret germ to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.”
“…the only remedy is to resolutely abandon the larger for the smaller field, to narrow one’s vision to one’s pencil, and do the small thing closely and deeply rather than the big thing loosely and superficially.”
“The short-story writer must not only know from what angle to present his anecdote if it is to give out all its fires, but must understand just why that particular angle and no other is the right one. He must therefore have turned his subject over and over, walked around it, so to speak…”
“The precious instinct of selection is distilled by that long patience which, if it be not genius, must be one of the genius’s chief reliances in communicating itself.”
“Nothing but deep familiarity with his subject will protect the short-story writer from another danger: that of contenting himself with a mere sketch of the episode selected.”
“True economy consists in the drawing out of one’s subject of every drop of significance it can give, true expenditure in devoting time, meditation and patient labour to the process of extraction and representation.”
Quotes from The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton. I highly recommend pairing this book with the George Saunders episode of the podcast In Writing with Hattie Crisell.