Stein on Writing

The writer becomes dispensable. The work must do the job.

The book then acts on the reader’s mind and emotions, unseen by the writer. In fact when the writer finishes his work, he can vanish from the earth and his book will continue to affect the reader’s mind and emotions.

The writer, having invented the character, can convey what the character thinks.

It can make us feel what happened, but dares not invent what happened. Nonfiction can describe effectively what people do and thereby move us, but it cannot invent those actions. Nonfiction can report what people say, but it cannot guess what they were thinking.

Today, the best of good journalists are arousing their readers’ curiosity in the first paragraph and seducing them into the rest of the story. A news story has become a story that contains the news.

E. L. Doctorow once put it, “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

As writers we don’t expel the result as raw material, we transmute it to provide what the reader most wants, an experience different from and richer than what he daily abides in life.

the two simple objectives of all prose writing, to be clear and to be precise.