Creative Wisdom From Writer Joan Didion
Joan Didion lived a wildly creative life with the magic of letters, words, and narratives.
Joan Didion wrote on many subjects in her life, from her breakup with New York, to grieving the loss of her husband, to the easily fabricated nature of truth, and much, much more.
She questioned everything, using the magic of letters, words, and narratives to try to find meaning in what we do. First, as a novelist and essayist, making sense of the world through words. Then, as a reporter and filmmaker, putting the pieces of a situation together in the pursuit of truth. And finally, as a cultural critic, interrogating the way society approaches itself.
Here are 10 of her creative truths on the value of soaking up knowledge and information, and then turning it on its head.
“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.” (A Year of Magical Thinking.)
“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… Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the Bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?” (“Why I Write”)
“But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’ We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker. And sometimes even the maker has difficulty with the meaning.” (“On Keeping a Notebook”)
“It is distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair.” (“Goodbye to All That”)
“People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes.” (“On Self-Respect”)
“We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” (“The White Album”)
“To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.” (“On Self-Respect”)
“I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.” (A Year of Magical Thinking.)
“The grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.” (“Planting a Tree is Not a Way of Life”)
“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become...” (The Year of Magical Thinking)
“It is easy to see the beginnings of things and harder to see the ends.” (“Goodbye to All That”)