{"id":28139,"date":"2015-10-03T01:00:02","date_gmt":"2015-10-03T05:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28139"},"modified":"2015-10-11T13:41:37","modified_gmt":"2015-10-11T17:41:37","slug":"qotd-the-hidden-roots-of-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/10\/03\/qotd-the-hidden-roots-of-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The hidden roots of writing"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>[V.S.] Pritchett begins with a conventional and not very promising theme, writers and money, and quietly turns it into a meditation on the importance of time, &#8220;the one necessity of their lives, not simply for high jinks \u2014 everyone has that \u2014 but time for their particular work.&#8221; He distinguishes two sorts of time important to writers: &#8220;\u2026the clock time of his prose factory and the vitally necessary unending time of reflection; without the latter his work that clocks in will be dead and automatic.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>Writing has a long gestation because the writer never knows what might prove useful. If he is, as Henry James suggests he ought to be, &#8220;one of those on whom nothing is lost,&#8221; he has no spare time, no &#8220;down time,&#8221; no time to kill. A hastily written pen-for-hire piece of journalism may have decades-old origins unknown even to the writer. Every thought, every experience, every book read, might come in handy. Pritchett alludes to Keats\u2019 notion of &#8220;negative capability&#8221; and adds: &#8220;A writer must have the capacity to become passive and lost in doubt in order to be open to new suggestion. He must alternate between clocking in and clocking out.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Patrick Kurp, <a href=\"http:\/\/evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.ca\/2014\/09\/they-never-stop-working.html\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;&#8216;They Never Stop Working'&#8221;, <em>Anecdotal Evidence<\/em><\/a>, 2014-09-17.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[V.S.] Pritchett begins with a conventional and not very promising theme, writers and money, and quietly turns it into a meditation on the importance of time, &#8220;the one necessity of their lives, not simply for high jinks \u2014 everyone has that \u2014 but time for their particular work.&#8221; He distinguishes two sorts of time important [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,41],"tags":[134],"class_list":["post-28139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-quotations","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7jR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28139"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28140,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28139\/revisions\/28140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}