Joan Didion is one of the great writers of the last 100 years. Or 500 years. No..make that the total amount of years that people have been writing. She began writing as a teen, re-typing Hemingway stories. As she states in a Paris Review interview from 1978:
"Hemingway taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time. A few years ago when I was teaching a course at Berkeley, I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell right back into those sentences. I mean they’re perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes. "
After working as an editor at Vogue in New York, Joan moved back to California, and started writing her great novels, books and screenplays with her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Together, they wrote The Panic in Needle Park, Play It as It Lays, A Star Is Born, True Confessions, and Up Close & Personal.
Those are some seriously brilliant screenplays, and some seriously brilliant films.Here is a baker’s dozen of dope quotes on writing from one of the world's greatest writers, Joan Didion. The first one really resonates with me the most, and is the one that she is most famous for saying. They are all great beliefs for writers to write by and to live by, and some are great themes to explore in your writings, too, and can also help with your verisimilitude.
Joan Didion Quotes On Writing
1. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
2 “Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”
3 “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”
4. “Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.”
5. “Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”
6. “Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
7. “Writers are always selling somebody out. “
8. “Writing is like painting, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.”
9. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want, and what I fear.”
10. “Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.”
11. “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves is so radically that they remake it in his image.”
12. “We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses, we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves.”
13. “I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that profess is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it.”
Man…I’d do anything for Joan Didion…cut her grass with a pair of scissors…wash her windows with Q-Tips …kill rats in her yard with my teeth….anything. I hope she’ll become a member of Stage32. I’d love to have her here -sharing her thoughts and feelings, commenting on what she reads, challenging writers to think better, and to be better. I’d love to have her as a member here. That would be awesome - wouldn’t it?
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Nice post, Bill. #9 sounds like a great definition of how to approach a first draft
Phil- How's your brother Peter? Is he going to make another sequel?
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Bill C: I love quote number twelve. It's very relevant to me as I get older and face the challenges life is tossing my way. When I write, I can be anyone, any age and any place in the world. What a gift to be able to do that. Thanks for posting.
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Terrific quotes by a very talented writer. Her screenwriting collaborations with her husband are excellent, particularly True Confessions. #10 is a great definition of character. Fittingly, Robert Redford, who starred in Up Close & Personal, said "If you don't have enemies, you don't have character."
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This is excellent. Thank you.
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Thanks guys....my goal is to get Joan to join Stage32 and share with us, and help us become better writers. She will be a Stage32 member by January 1, 2019, or I'm not a cat who wears a Santa hat and who has a "Happy Holidays" sign across his back!
BEST HOPES, PRAYERS AND WISHES TO THE VICTIMS, FAMILIES, AND FIREFIGHTERS IN CALIFORNIA.
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Go, go, go!
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I've found Didion's approach to rewrites useful at times, "I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm... It gets me past that blank terror."
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An incredible talent that I have an incredible respect for. As far as some of her quotes shared in your post, #10. “Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.” is an awesome one for me. One does create their own reality, and when ones realizes this, one also learns how to love oneself, and then .. then, you become a Powerhouse.
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I sincerely hope she does join us. It would be a true honor.
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My favorite: “Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.” It would be incredible to have her here - she's a total inspiration!
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I have such a long-standing real - and imaginary - relationship with Joan Didion. I have a list of writers who really shaped my abilities over the 52 years that I've been actively writing, and I don't think any of them has made me a better writer more than Saul Bellow, Studs Terkel, Mike Royko, Robert Dana and Joan Didion.
And because I knew the other four, and engaged with them regularly - and only saw Joan Didion once - my relationship with her is more of an imaginary one, but my knowledge gained from her isn't.
But I was first turned on to Slouching Towards Bethlehem by a great Professor, David Spurr, himself a phenomenal world-traveled journalist, writer and thinker. and she just rocked my Chicago-style 5 W's world. And she was pretty hot-looking too, and a California Girl. I'm not trying to sound sexist or anything - I'm just an honest guy who never hides his intentions when it comes to some things. And I'm all-Italian, and have it in my genes and blood, and am a passionate admirer of aesthetics connected to intellect. And she just made me want to go to California and find a girl like her. And in those years - the early 1980's - California was like a "magical place" to us grounded folk in old-school and snow-covered Chicago, and probably to other people elsewhere, too. And in some ways now, I think California - and mostly L.A./Hollywood/San Francisco - still has that kinda magical/idealistic/romanticized representation in some peoples' minds. I'd bet on that, for sure. I mean, why do people just get up and go there, with no sure things lined up and awaiting them?
But she embodied what I was idealistically desired. But it couldn't be her, since she was happily married - and to a big Irish man who was a great writer himself and who would have probably buried me in the sand head first without wrinkling his shirt. But she just made me want to find a girl like her: a hippie-type; a new journalism writer; a writer who was fearless and who told the truth; and who was a California hottie to boot. I wonder how many people went to California to find their Joan Didion. Probably very many.
So I have this delusional/romanticized way with regards to Joan Didion, and always will. I'll always be - emotionally and sentimentally - this 20 year-old student who was undergoing some radical changes, and she'll always be this older, wiser woman-of-the-world to me. Who was also a hottie.
And I will get her to join Stage32. How can she say no after reading that?
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David: you, Joey, J and Kelly all mentioned #10. That came from an article that Joan wrote for Vogue back in....man....57 years ago. Check out the article - and the pretty amazing backstory associated with it - in the preface. "... to the exact character count". Man. I feel like a broken cracker next to a freshly-baked croissant when I look at some of her works.
But that article rings so true 57 years later. It's another example of how ageless Joan Didion's works are - and probably more relevant in this day and age than ever before, and especially for screenwriters who probably need that in every word they write if they wanna sell a spec script. Here is a link to that piece:
https://www.vogue.com/article/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961
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Hi Bill! It is truly wonderful to find these people I have never encountered before, like Joan! and her brilliant words that wrap around you like a warm blanket! ...to not just pass through this life, but to Live in it! ...How brave and beautiful! To live this life clothed with courage, though pain and the vulnerability of being human tug like a heavy overcoat..to press on anyways with enough faith to believe that even one life born in weakness can be made strong, waxed valiant to flight. Thank you so much Bill!
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Bill, thank you. Once again you have highlighted for us the life of someone truly worthy of respect and admiration.
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Rachel Walker, how beautifully expressed.
Patricia: yeah, Joan Didion's greatness as a writer is zen-like. I know at least a few writers who in the last couple weeks started reading her stuff, and have been affected by it. So that's a great thing.
Here is a link to an article written by Alexa Ardeljan-Braden about Joan Didion and Los Angeles. Just typing that made me think of Patti Smith's poem about New York. They're not quite the same overall feelings, but maybe they are, I don't know. Patti Smith's: "New York is the thing that seduced me. New York is the thing that formed me. New York is the thing that deformed me. New York is the thing that perverted me. New York is the thing converted me. New York is the thing that I love."
Here is the link to Alexa's article about Joan Didion. And if you click on Alexa's name there, she has written many other great articles, too.
https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/california/articles/joan-di...
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Dear Patricia! Thank you sooo much!! I am very honored by your kind words!!! :-)
हाय मैं एक भारतीय लेखकों हूं और मुझे परियोजना के लिए आपसे बात करनी है ताकि आप मुझसे बात कर सकें। मैं आपके संदेश की प्रतीक्षा कर रहा हूं। मुझे आशा है कि आप मुझे पहले से कहीं ज्यादा संदेश भेजेंगे।
Raj: yeah...kinda....but I think Joan was just trying to show how disaffected they could be, and wasn't taking a stand either way on it, if I'm reading your words right. Heh-heh.
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Translation: Even here in our faraway and exotic land we have heard of "The Bill," a most venerated denizen of screenwriting websites and prowler of streets with bag of candy. Namaste.