"You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really"
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Banks is puncturing the romantic myth that writing is just talent, or just inspiration, or just voice. He frames it as a two-part competence: substance and delivery. The dash does a lot of work here: it’s the pivot from the noble-sounding "something worth saying" to the colder, craft-minded reality that saying it well is its own discipline. That little "- writing's a double skill, really" has the tone of an aside tossed off in conversation, but it lands like a quiet rebuke to anyone who thinks a good idea entitles them to good prose.
The intent is clarifying, almost diagnostic. Plenty of people can generate opinions; fewer can generate insight. And even insight doesn’t automatically survive contact with the page. Banks is insisting that content and form are not rivals but collaborators. You can feel a novelist’s impatience with both kinds of amateur hour: the stylist who dazzles with sentences that ultimately go nowhere, and the thinker who has a point but can’t build a readable, persuasive vehicle for it.
Context matters because Banks lived in both registers: the literary realism of The Wasp Factory and the big-idea architecture of the Culture novels. He knew that "worth saying" might be psychological menace, political skepticism, or futuristic ethics - but it still needs scene, voice, rhythm, compression. The subtext: readers aren’t obliged to do the work for you. If you want to be heard, you earn it twice.
The intent is clarifying, almost diagnostic. Plenty of people can generate opinions; fewer can generate insight. And even insight doesn’t automatically survive contact with the page. Banks is insisting that content and form are not rivals but collaborators. You can feel a novelist’s impatience with both kinds of amateur hour: the stylist who dazzles with sentences that ultimately go nowhere, and the thinker who has a point but can’t build a readable, persuasive vehicle for it.
Context matters because Banks lived in both registers: the literary realism of The Wasp Factory and the big-idea architecture of the Culture novels. He knew that "worth saying" might be psychological menace, political skepticism, or futuristic ethics - but it still needs scene, voice, rhythm, compression. The subtext: readers aren’t obliged to do the work for you. If you want to be heard, you earn it twice.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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