"The engineering is secondary to the vision"
About this Quote
A small provocation disguised as craft advice: if you start by worshipping the machinery, you end up building a very efficient nothing. Cynthia Ozick, a novelist famously impatient with the cozy and the merely “well-made,” draws a line between competence and meaning. “Engineering” gestures at technique, structure, even the fetish for process that modern culture loves to reward: outlines, systems, workshops, productivity hacks, plot as architecture. “Secondary” doesn’t insult it; it demotes it. The sentence is a rebuke to a certain kind of professionalization, where art becomes a set of best practices and a book becomes a deliverable.
The power of the phrasing is its blunt hierarchy. Vision isn’t presented as inspiration or vibes; it’s a governing principle, a claim about what the work is for. In Ozick’s literary universe, that “for” is moral and intellectual as much as aesthetic. She’s writing against the idea that novels are primarily entertainment products or technical puzzles. When vision leads, engineering becomes expressive: form is chosen because it’s the right vessel for an obsession, an argument, a metaphysical itch.
There’s also a cultural subtext that lands even harder now, in an era of templates and algorithms. We’re surrounded by immaculate engineering: frictionless platforms, optimized content, beautifully calibrated narratives. Ozick’s line is a warning that optimization can mimic depth. Vision is what can’t be reverse-engineered from metrics; it’s the risk, the stance, the reason a sentence exists beyond proving the writer can assemble sentences.
The power of the phrasing is its blunt hierarchy. Vision isn’t presented as inspiration or vibes; it’s a governing principle, a claim about what the work is for. In Ozick’s literary universe, that “for” is moral and intellectual as much as aesthetic. She’s writing against the idea that novels are primarily entertainment products or technical puzzles. When vision leads, engineering becomes expressive: form is chosen because it’s the right vessel for an obsession, an argument, a metaphysical itch.
There’s also a cultural subtext that lands even harder now, in an era of templates and algorithms. We’re surrounded by immaculate engineering: frictionless platforms, optimized content, beautifully calibrated narratives. Ozick’s line is a warning that optimization can mimic depth. Vision is what can’t be reverse-engineered from metrics; it’s the risk, the stance, the reason a sentence exists beyond proving the writer can assemble sentences.
Quote Details
| Topic | Vision & Strategy |
|---|
More Quotes by Cynthia
Add to List
