When it comes to reading and writing there are different views on how each task should be performed. No one has the right criteria on how readers and writers should function but there are definitely some ideas that many agree with. Looking at Eudora Welty’s “One Writer’s Beginnings” and Vladimir Nabokov’s “Good Readers and Writers” one can evaluate some of their thoughts to be more similar than they appear. Both authors believe the ideas of self-values, imagination, creativity, knowledge, and reality essential to great writing and reading. Even though Welty may seem more emotional with her writing and reading in contrast to Nabokov’s passionate realistic approach, I believe both express similar thoughts about how a reader and writer should operate.
A good reader and writer is not created by someone’s specific criteria or views. A person is responsible to create his or her own values and criteria to be a great writer or reader. Now, Welty is definitely a true believer of such case. She experienced her reading based on her morals and belief
s as a child. Very innocent but knowledgeable she was as a child. Welty’s style and character for writing also developed because of her own mind and views. This is exactly what Nabokov is saying in his essay. He quotes, “but the real writer… has no given values at his disposal: he must create them himself.”(1005) Neither author has followed any one else’s values but their own. Their own mind and spirit has guided them to be what they have become.
While originality and imagination is essential for great artists, the power of knowledge and the scientific world is a great part of novelists. Reality is what creates the balance between too much of a fairy tail and a real event novel. Nabokov is concrete about such issue, “The enthusiastic artist alone is apt to be too subjective in his attitude towards a book, and so a scientific coolness of judgment will temper the intuitive heat” (1007). Welty’s face off with reality was when she had discovered as a child books were not miraculous wonders but the work of men and women. Then as an adult, she wa