I guess it was at my other blog that I wrote about reading Eudora Welty’s book The Eye of the Story. I’m having a lot of difficulty understanding the eminent American novelist. The problem—that is, if the problem isn’t the inferior mental abilities of the reader—is Welty’s writing style. She seems to have channeled the complicated prose of the Victorian non-fiction writers. I’d say that she channeled the complicated sentence structures of William Faulkner, but I haven’t really read enough of Faulkner to know that for sure. Other’s say Faulkner is complicated, but I don’t want to simply echo that without knowing it for myself.

But back to Welty’s advice on writing. The second of the book, titled “On Writing,” includes these chapters.

– Looking at Short Stories
– Writing and Analyzing a Story
– Place in Fiction
– Words into Fiction
– Must the Novelist Crusade?
– “Is Phoenix Jackson’s Grandson Really Dead?”
– Some Notes on Time in Fiction

I’m currently reading “Words into Fiction,” and finding it hard going, as were the first two chapters in this section. The third chapter, however, I found a few things to latch on to. Now, I believe she said it with complicated sentence structure that was totally unnecessary. Here’s a few key statements from this chapter.

Place is one of the lesser angels that watch over the racing hand of fiction, perhaps the one that gazes benignly enough from off to one side, which others, like character, plot, symbolic meaning, and so on, are doing a good deal of wing-beating about her chair, and feeling, who in my eyes carries the crown, soars highest of them all and rightly relegates place into the shade.

…the novel from the start has been bound up in the local , the “real,” the present, the ordinary day-to-day of human experience.

No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk—experiment—is a considerable part of the joy of doing, which is the lone, simple reason all writers of serious fiction are willing to work as hard as they do.

I have much more to say about this, but unfortunately my mind is spent tonight. More later, I hope.