Have you ever cried in front of a work of art? Write down six things about it that made you cry. Tack the list to your studio wall. Those are magical abracadabras for you.
- Jerry Salz, How to Be an Artist
No two of my stories are every constructed in the same way, but broadly viewed they all have exactly the same genes, and I confess I cannot conceive of any creative fiction written from any other beginning ... that of a generally intensified emotional sensibility ...
It’s in the unspectacular, the mundane, the sudden surprise around ordinary circumstances ... “when events that usually pass almost unnoticed, suddenly move you deeply, when a sunset lifts out to exaltation, when a squeaking door throws you into a fit of exasperation .... or an injustice reported in the newspapers to a flaming indignation, a sudden warm love of human nature, a discovered meanness in yourself or another, to despair ... in my own case, it is far more likely to seize on some slight trifle, the shade of expression somebody’s face, or the tone of somebody’s voice, than to accept a more complete, ready-made episode. Especially this emotion refuses to crystallize about, or to have anything to do with those narrations of our actual life, offering by friends who are sure that such-and-such a happening is so strange or interesting that ‘it ought to be in a story.’
The beginning of a story is then for me in the more than usual sensitiveness to emotion ... I get simultaneously a strong thrill of intense feeling and an intense desire to pas it on to other people ... I recognize it for the “right” one when it brings with it an irresistible impulse to try to make other people feel it.”
- Dorothy Canfield, Flint and Fire