Writers on Writing: Grace Paley

In a 1998 Vanity Fair interview, poet and short-story writer Grace Paley said that she was so "neurotically anti-authoritarian" that she couldn't read a cookbook instruction "without the furious response: 'Is that a direct order?'"

Paley, who died this week at age 84, was a card-carrying, dues-paying hell-raiser--a self-described "combative pacifist.'' She also had a distinctive way of commanding words, speaking, as Anne Tyler observed, "in a voice so absolutely her own that a single line . . . could be identified as hers among a hundred other lines."

Voice may be the most elusive quality of good prose--and the most difficult to master. Let's listen to Paley's indomitable voice as she shares her thoughts on writing and the writing process.

Language

I remember just loving language when I was young, and I remember that my own writing could be awkward sometimes because of it. I would just throw words up in the air and see where they fell. Sometimes when the writing of young people seems opaque, it may be because those young people love language so much they can't get past the language.
(quoted by Nina Darnton in "Taking Risks: The Writer as Effective Teacher," The New York Times, April 13, 1986)

The Writer's Voice

Voice is very important to me. It may not be so important to others, but until I was able to get that voice--which I may have had in ordinary speech as a young person, but I didn't get in prose or poetry, even, until my mid-30s, late 30s--I couldn't really write. I don't even know how people can write if they don't find their voice, their language. It's a mystery to me. But one of the ways I did do it was, I began to write in different voices--I didn't use my own voice.
(Interview with A.M. Homes in "All My Habits Are Bad," Salon, Oct. 26, 1998)

Writing as Exploration

I write about things I don’t know all that well just to try and understand them. The act of writing is an investigative, learning act.
(Gail Pool and Shirley Roses, "An Interview with Grace Paley," Boston Review, Fall 1976)

Listening

Paley told her students at Sarah Lawrence College that writers need two ears: One ear, she said, for the literary canon, the stories and poems you study in school, and another for "family and childhood and specifically the ordinary language of your time--which, though I use the word 'ordinary,' is always extraordinary, I think."
(quoted by Neda Ulaby, All Things Considered, August 23, 2007)

Revising

[R]evision is that--you get closer and closer to what you really mean to say. . . . [E]ven to this day, every one of my first drafts is still terrible. They haven't improved over the years, somehow. I really have to go through and take stuff out.
(Interview with A.M. Homes in "All My Habits Are Bad," Salon, Oct. 26, 1998)

Interviews with Grace Paley:

• "All My Habits Are Bad," interviewed by A.M. Homes, Salon, Oct. 26, 1998.
• "Grace Paley on Her Life and Work," interviewed by Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times, June 10, 2007.

More Writers on Writing:

• Advice from One Writer to Another
• "The Editor of the Breakfast Table," by Charles J. Shields
• What Is Style?

Image: Grace Paley, keynote speaker at the fourth annual Gender and Women's Studies Conference in Savannah, Georgia, March 2006. © Armstrong Atlantic State University.