{"id":7988,"date":"2011-01-05T11:15:15","date_gmt":"2011-01-05T16:15:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=7988"},"modified":"2011-01-05T11:15:15","modified_gmt":"2011-01-05T16:15:15","slug":"why-do-you-like-to-write","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/why-do-you-like-to-write\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Why Do You Like to Write?&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Writers don&#8217;t talk about this question too much. Much more fun and entertaining, after all, to complain about the difficulties and pains; who doesn&#8217;t like people to feel sorry for them? But the quote below (with my emphasis added)\u00a0excerpts an answer\u00a0<a title=\"John Fosse: 'The Gnosis of Writing'\" href=\"http:\/\/norway.poetryinternational.org.poetryinternationalweb.org\/piw_cms\/cms\/cms_module\/index.php?obj_id=17679&amp;x=1\" target=\"_blank\">from Jon Fosse<\/a>,\u00a0at the Poetry International Web (sorta awkwardly translated by May-Brit Akerholt, in my opinion,\u00a0in comma-spliced and run-on form):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;when I write something I feel is well written, something new has come into the world, something that wasn\u2019t there before, I have, as it were created existence, and this, the joy of writing people and stories, yes, whole universes no one knew about, not even I, before I had written them, surprises me, and gives me joy. No one knew about this, not before I wrote it. And where does it come from? I&#8217;ve no idea, because it is new to me as well. I probably hadn\u2019t thought about it before. Writing, good writing, will therefore always be a place where something unknown, something which didn\u2019t exist before, is given existence. And that, writing as a state where something, yes in a sense even a whole new universe, is created and given a kind of existence for the first time, is perhaps what I enjoy most about writing. <em>A whole new universe comes into being every time you write well.<\/em> Because all good texts, yes poems too, are in a certain sense a new universe, which did not exist before, but which is created in good writing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;ll add: for me, one of the great joys of <em>reading<\/em> good writing lies in experiencing, vicariously, the writer&#8217;s delight at the moment something unexpected happened on the page or screen. I think I sense this sort of exclamation-point moment in books and other &#8220;formal&#8221; writing, but I&#8217;ve also seen it between the lines in casual text: text messages and chat sessions, one-off blog posts, and yes, even some Facebook status updates and Twitter posts.*<\/p>\n<p>___________________________<\/p>\n<p>* Sorry, Froog. :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Writers don&#8217;t talk about this question too much. Much more fun and entertaining, after all, to complain about the difficulties and pains; who doesn&#8217;t like people to feel sorry for them? But the quote below (with my emphasis added)\u00a0excerpts an answer\u00a0from Jon Fosse,\u00a0at the Poetry International Web (sorta awkwardly translated by May-Brit Akerholt, in my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"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,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,5,36,372],"tags":[2143,2144,2145],"class_list":{"0":"post-7988","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ruminations","7":"category-06_writing","8":"category-reading","9":"category-style-and-craft","10":"tag-jon-fosse","11":"tag-poetry-international-web","12":"tag-the-pleasure-of-writing","13":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-24Q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7988"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7989,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7988\/revisions\/7989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}