Elliott Colla Quotes About Writing

• When you're writing your own fiction, you don't have to ride two horses.

  Elliott Colla

  Horse, Writing, Two

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

• Si he aprendido a escribir ficción es trabajando con grandes escritores y haciendo que me expliquen su oficio para poder hacerlo en inglés.

  Elliott Colla

  Writing, Fiction, Crafts

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

• Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference. In a way, if someone says this didn't feel exactly right, I don't care. But that is not okay to do in academia - it's not about feeling. You want to establish a pretty solid case. So did this allow me to express things differently? Absolutely. Another thing I've been thinking about as an academic: our writing style is expository, and in fiction, withholding information matters quite a bit. Withholding things in academia - there's no place for that!

  Elliott Colla

  Writing, Thinking, Feelings

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

• Translation is harder, believe it or not. You do have to come up with a story, and actually I'm mystified by that process. I don't exactly know how the story just comes, but it does. But in writing a story that you're inventing, versus writing a story that somebody else has made up - there's a world of difference. In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing.

  Elliott Colla

  Believe, Writing, World

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

• I wrote Baghdad Central right after translating a great work by Ibrahim al-Koni, who is sort of a master of Arab fiction. In conversations with him I realized that translations have been my MFA program. If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English. That's how I've figured it out.

  Elliott Colla

  Writing, Program, Great Work

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

• A high-ranking Syrian official in DC laughed when he heard I was reading Michel Aflaq and writing this book. He said, "Let me tell you something. There are no Baathists, no one believes this stuff, this is stuff you read in school because it's assigned to you. Maybe someone believed it, but no one really believes it." And I thought that was really interesting to hear, because the ideology of Baathism was presented so often to Americans as the core of what's wrong.

  Elliott Colla

  Believe, Book, Reading

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

• El Estado baasista hizo dos cosas extremadamente bien. Una fue crear redes de inteligencia de recogida de información y un sistema de archivos. En realidad hay mucha información sobre mucha gente y eso es un logro importante de un Estado policial. La segunda es la promoción de la literatura y la poesía, y las artes en general. Así que este es un estado que está produciendo archivos policiales masivos - vigilancia - y poesía. Y de hecho muchos de los archivos tratan sobre lo que los poetas escriben o lo que deberían escribir.

  Elliott Colla

  Arte, Escritura, Personas

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

• Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference.

  Elliott Colla

  Writing, Differences, Fiction

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

• It does not take much to imagine the humanity of people you don't know. An American author does not need to know a word of Arabic to write a book like the one I wrote.

  Elliott Colla

  Libro, Escritura, Personas

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com