In a letter to Walker Percy, Shelby Foote exhorted Percy to get to work on his desire to write fiction, saying something that is true about any craftsman pursuing any craft:
“But the most heart-breaking thing about it is: the better you get, the harder youll have to work–because your standards will rise with your ability. I mentioned ‘work’–it’s the wrong word: because if youre serious, the whole creative process is attended with pleasure in a form which very few people ever know. Putting two words together in a sequence that pleases you, really pleases you, brings a satisfaction which must be kin to what a businessman feels when he manages a sharp transaction–something like that, but on a higher plane because the businessman must know that soon he will have spent the dollars he made; but those two words which the writer set together have produced an effect which will never die as long as men can read with understanding.
So much for execution. I cant even begin to speak of conception–it comes from God.”
Shelby Foote on Hard Work: In a letter to Walker Percy, Shelby Foote exhorted Percy to get to work on his desi… http://t.co/9sq30X4mJd
RT @DrJimHamilton: Shelby Foote: “the better you get, the harder youll have to work-because your standards will rise with your ability” htt…
You should have heard Mr. LaCroix teaching composition in Beaumont High School in the fifties. He was bombastic, telling us how to write. So I wrote a paper using all of his techniques to tell him he was wrong, My source was an author named Jack Woodford, who could not write a decent novel, if he had tried. However, he wrote the best books on writing that I have ever seen in a life of seventy some years, five degrees, work on number six, attendance at 10 colleges and universities, and teaching at three schools above the secondary level. Foote, as a Civil War Historian, was kind of interesting.
RT @DrJimHamilton: Shelby Foote: “the better you get, the harder youll have to work-because your standards will rise with your ability” htt…