I stumbled across this lovely little essay by Raymond Carver about writing.

I once sat down to write what turned out to be a pretty good story, though only the first sentence of the story had offered itself to me when I began it. For several days I’d been going around with this sentence in my head: “He was running the vacuum cleaner when the telephone rang.” I knew a story was there and that it wanted telling.

Carver is about to launch into a discussion of taking the time to write well–something with which I could not agree more–but I am going to use it to tie into something else Carver said:

Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don’t know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else. ”The World According to Garp” is of course the marvelous world according to John Irving. There is another world according to Flannery O’Connor, and others according to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. There are worlds according to Cheever, Updike, Singer, Stanley Elkin, Ann Beattie, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Barthelme, Mary Robison, William Kittredge, Barry Hannah. Every great, or even every very good writer, makes the world over according to his* own specifications.

Let me just say that I will never write a story that begins with the sentence: “He was running the vacuum cleaner when the telephone rang.” Indeed, if the idea ever lodges in my head that this sentence has a story in it, I would pray to the heavens to be struck by lightning as a sort of divine ECT, or failing that (since the gods do not seem as useful as they were in ancient times), that I should be leapt upon by psychiatric nurses armed with the latest in antipsychotic injectables. I cannot think of a worse opening sentence. Even the infamous Bulwer-Lytton sentence, encrusted as it is with barnacles of traditional scorn, is immeasurably superior.

This is not intended as a criticism of Carver. The opposite is intended. It is a mark of Carver’s genius that he could see a story in such a mundane sentence, and even more so that he could actually write that story in such a way as to enthrall readers. As Carver wrote: every good writer “makes the world over according to his* own specifications.” Even if your sole ambition as a writer is to emulate someone else, say you want to write horror like H. P. Lovecraft, you simply can’t bring anyone but yourself to the writing desk. And if you’re any good at all, your work won’t be Lovecraft recycled. You’ll write “A Colder War” or “A Study in Emerald.”**

* Or her, naturally.
** Praise be to Charles Stross and Neil Gaiman for making these stories free online.