On Writing

By Raymond Carver

“Ambition and a little luck are good things for a writer to have going for him.  Too much ambition and bad luck, or no luck at all, can be killing.  There has to be talent.”

“Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don’t know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else …. Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.”

“It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone.  It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes.  It is his world and no other.  This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another.  Not talent.  There’s plenty of that around.  But a writer who has some special way of looking at tihngs and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.”

“If the words are heavy with the writer’s own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason — if the words are in any way blurred — the reader’s eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved.  The reader’s own artistic sense will simply not be engaged.  Henry James called this sort of hapless writing ‘weak specifications’.”