Category: Louis Zukofsky

This story was a story of our time. And a writer’s attempts not to fathom his time amount but to sounding his mind in it.

This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in character do not readily help the writer’s hand to set down a sentence of that order. For though characters must take things in their own stride – somewhere in his story the writer cannot hold back this sentence that judges them. He wants it unobtrusive to his pace and the characters that caused him to write. The difficulty is to judge without seeming to be there, with a finality in the words that will make them casual and part of the story itself, except perhaps to another age.

The more the words of others impressed him with their factual content, the more he felt he must wait for his own facts before being tempted into words.

This story was a story of our time. And a writer’s attempts not to fathom his time amount but to sounding his mind in it.

This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in character do not readily help the writer’s hand to set down a sentence of that order. For though characters must take things in their own stride – somewhere in his story the writer cannot hold back this sentence that judges them. He wants it unobtrusive to his pace and the characters that caused him to write. The difficulty is to judge without seeming to be there, with a finality in the words that will make them casual and part of the story itself, except perhaps to another age.

The more the words of others impressed him with their factual content, the more he felt he must wait for his own facts before being tempted into words.