Quoted: Gary Lutz on writing fiction

I just do what my nervous system wants done or allows me to do. It's not in my nature to care about plots. I do not see storylines in my life. Life hits me by the instant. My writing is a record of one instant after another, with causality mostly drained away. I am trying to describe how life and the world look and feel to me. The world has already been plentifully described otherwise. I have nothing to add to those descriptions and see no reason to try. Characterization is no concern of mine either. The last thing I want to do is to bring somebody new into words. I practice birth control of a typologized kind. -- Gary  Lutz

I found this quote in Jenny Davidson's book Reading Styles, which I am enjoying right now, and is a nice break from pomo, post-pomo, tethered-to-academia criticism. (She references everyone from Austen to Gaiman to pulpy crime novels.) I like this quote because it comes closer than anything I've ever read to how I think about creating fiction. Or, Ideally, how I could create fiction.

It also makes me wonder if he is primarily a visual thinker, something that's supposed to be anathema to "good" writing, or, at least, something that makes good writing -- good narrative, proper sequencing -- difficult. Lutz's work is more like snapshots, divorced from time and place.