Impartial practice

Bits from Wallace Stegner’s On Teaching and Writing Fiction:

Reading: As enlargement. Seeking “how another waif in a bewildering world has made out to survive and perhaps be at peace.” Making sense of human differences, privacy, dignity, pain. An “intense acquaintance” with oneself. The subject matter of serious fiction cannot be ideas: “They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark.”

Writing: Sanity and light and compassion. Sensuous. Clear concept of the self and of society. Richly imagined from the whole heart. Upon whom nothing is lost. Private, not self-indulgent. Assertive. Conviction of belonging in the kingdom of man. Stopping a story is as hard as saying good night.