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Vivian Gornick

Vivian Gornick Quotes

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Famous Vivian Gornick Quotes

“In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the "other" as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing. When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir - where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster - the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.”

EmpathyMemoirMemoir WritingEssayEssay WritingNarratorPersonal NarrativeCreating Dimension In Character
Book:The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
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“The presence in a memoir or an essay of the truth speaker - the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience - it was about this alone that I felt I had something to say; and it was to those works in which such a narrator comes through strong and clear that I was invariably drawn.”

InspirationMemoirEssayCreative NonfictionEssay WritingNarratorPersonal Narrative
Book:The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
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