# The Way of the Writer  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Charles Johnson]] - Full Title:: The Way of the Writer - Category: #books ## Highlights > During the course I have students read Northrop Frye’s lovely The Educated Imagination to help them see, in my paraphrasing of Kant, that education without imagination is empty, and imagination without education is blind. ([Location 509](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=509)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > All that was long ago, but I’ve often wanted to repeat this exercise. What a lover of words and their beauty discovers after doing this chore (which soon ceases to be a chore and becomes a fascinating meditation on etymology, and on life itself in all its permutations) is that there is literally a word for every object, material or immaterial, every relation, and every process that human beings have experienced. Because that is what words are: the crystallization in language of thousands of years of experience across numerous cultures and civilizations, each word being the almost tangible flesh in which thought is tabernacled. ([Location 614](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=614)) > have ([Location 747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=747)) > Or when he fails to keep his wounds under “partial control.” Between or during periods of creativity, he or she may blunt that discomfort with drugs, alcohol, sexual adventures (and sometimes all three at once), or some other form of self-destructive addiction. One cannot help but feel that this description of the writer’s wound as the basis for creativity is touching only on the surface of the malaise and not penetrating to its roots. ([Location 1784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=1784)) > It is the wound, Gardner says, that makes the writer “driven.” And there, my friends, resides the problem. This kind of writer knows no peace, only a chronic, free-floating sense of “discomfort.” ([Location 1787](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=1787)) > Therefore, writers need not be attached to either their “wound” or the work it gives rise to. Instead, their work can spring from an abiding peace and feeling of thanksgiving; from the joy to be found in living mindfully and exercising their hard-won skills because exploring the inexhaustible pleasures of the ever-mysterious creative process feels so danged good. ([Location 1795](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=1795)) > There, in that essay, Baldwin said, “A man is not a man until he’s able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others.” ([Location 1829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=1829)) > The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. —Mark Twain ([Location 1849](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=1849)) > Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. —Sir Francis Bacon ([Location 1851](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=1851)) > The young . . . are today not enthusiastic . . . about books. They merely approve when books suit their politics. . . . I think it is a pity that they do not read for pleasure. They may presently find that an acquaintance with the great works of art and thought is their only real assurance against the increasing barbarism of our time. —Edmund Wilson, The Nation, 1938 ([Location 1853](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=1853)) > What a writer in our time has to do is write what hasn’t been written or beat dead men at what they have done. —Ernest Hemingway ([Location 1967](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=1967)) > Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost! —Henry James, The Art of Fiction ([Location 2030](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=2030)) > Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. —John Gardner, The Art of Fiction ([Location 2071](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=2071)) > I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters. —Frank Lloyd Wright ([Location 2076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=2076)) > Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. —T. S. Eliot ([Location 2287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=2287)) > When thinking about this matter, I always find myself remembering Julius Lester’s essay collection Falling Pieces of the Broken Sky (1990), and especially what he wisely says in one lovely piece, entitled “The Cultural Canon.” Let’s listen to his historically important voice for a moment: The function of education is not to confirm us in who we are; it is to introduce us to all that we are not. Education should overwhelm us to such an extent that we will never again assume that our experience as individuals or as part of a collective can be equated with human experience. In other words, education should impress us with how vast creation is and how small we are in the midst of it; and in the acceptance of that is the beginning of wisdom. My education did not confirm me as a black man; it confirmed me as one who had the same questions as Plato and Aristotle. And my education told me that as a black person, it was not only right to ask those questions, it was even okay to put forward my own answers and stand them next to those of Plato and Aristotle. The cultural canon was presented to me in such a way that I was thrust into that vast and complex mystery which life is; and I graduated from college with an intense and passionate curiosity, which led me to study that which my formal education had omitted—namely, black history and literature and women’s history and much, much more. It is the function of education to introduce the student to the terrifying unknown and provide not only the intellectual skills to make known the unknown but the emotional stability to withstand the terror when the unknown cannot be made known. Such an experience gives the student the self-confidence to go forth and face that mystery which lies at the core of each of us: Who am I? ([Location 2384](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=2384)) # The Way of the Writer  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Charles Johnson]] - Full Title:: The Way of the Writer - Category: #books ## Highlights > During the course I have students read Northrop Frye’s lovely The Educated Imagination to help them see, in my paraphrasing of Kant, that education without imagination is empty, and imagination without education is blind. ([Location 509](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=509)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > All that was long ago, but I’ve often wanted to repeat this exercise. What a lover of words and their beauty discovers after doing this chore (which soon ceases to be a chore and becomes a fascinating meditation on etymology, and on life itself in all its permutations) is that there is literally a word for every object, material or immaterial, every relation, and every process that human beings have experienced. Because that is what words are: the crystallization in language of thousands of years of experience across numerous cultures and civilizations, each word being the almost tangible flesh in which thought is tabernacled. ([Location 614](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=614)) > have ([Location 747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=747)) > Or when he fails to keep his wounds under “partial control.” Between or during periods of creativity, he or she may blunt that discomfort with drugs, alcohol, sexual adventures (and sometimes all three at once), or some other form of self-destructive addiction. One cannot help but feel that this description of the writer’s wound as the basis for creativity is touching only on the surface of the malaise and not penetrating to its roots. ([Location 1784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=1784)) > It is the wound, Gardner says, that makes the writer “driven.” And there, my friends, resides the problem. This kind of writer knows no peace, only a chronic, free-floating sense of “discomfort.” ([Location 1787](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=1787)) > Therefore, writers need not be attached to either their “wound” or the work it gives rise to. Instead, their work can spring from an abiding peace and feeling of thanksgiving; from the joy to be found in living mindfully and exercising their hard-won skills because exploring the inexhaustible pleasures of the ever-mysterious creative process feels so danged good. ([Location 1795](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=1795)) > There, in that essay, Baldwin said, “A man is not a man until he’s able and willing to accept his own vision of the world, no matter how radically this vision departs from that of others.” ([Location 1829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=1829)) > The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. —Mark Twain ([Location 1849](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=1849)) > Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. —Sir Francis Bacon ([Location 1851](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=1851)) > The young . . . are today not enthusiastic . . . about books. They merely approve when books suit their politics. . . . I think it is a pity that they do not read for pleasure. They may presently find that an acquaintance with the great works of art and thought is their only real assurance against the increasing barbarism of our time. —Edmund Wilson, The Nation, 1938 ([Location 1853](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=1853)) > What a writer in our time has to do is write what hasn’t been written or beat dead men at what they have done. —Ernest Hemingway ([Location 1967](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=1967)) > Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost! —Henry James, The Art of Fiction ([Location 2030](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=2030)) > Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. —John Gardner, The Art of Fiction ([Location 2071](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=2071)) > I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters. —Frank Lloyd Wright ([Location 2076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=2076)) > Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. —T. S. Eliot ([Location 2287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=2287)) > When thinking about this matter, I always find myself remembering Julius Lester’s essay collection Falling Pieces of the Broken Sky (1990), and especially what he wisely says in one lovely piece, entitled “The Cultural Canon.” Let’s listen to his historically important voice for a moment: The function of education is not to confirm us in who we are; it is to introduce us to all that we are not. Education should overwhelm us to such an extent that we will never again assume that our experience as individuals or as part of a collective can be equated with human experience. In other words, education should impress us with how vast creation is and how small we are in the midst of it; and in the acceptance of that is the beginning of wisdom. My education did not confirm me as a black man; it confirmed me as one who had the same questions as Plato and Aristotle. And my education told me that as a black person, it was not only right to ask those questions, it was even okay to put forward my own answers and stand them next to those of Plato and Aristotle. The cultural canon was presented to me in such a way that I was thrust into that vast and complex mystery which life is; and I graduated from college with an intense and passionate curiosity, which led me to study that which my formal education had omitted—namely, black history and literature and women’s history and much, much more. It is the function of education to introduce the student to the terrifying unknown and provide not only the intellectual skills to make known the unknown but the emotional stability to withstand the terror when the unknown cannot be made known. Such an experience gives the student the self-confidence to go forth and face that mystery which lies at the core of each of us: Who am I? ([Location 2384](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01CO343KS&location=2384))