“If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG Ballard.”
MAPPING
Narrative method, mythical shapes, hysterical realism, literary maximalism, codified things, unauthentic representation.
The Art of Fiction No. 42
“I never go out to look for a story. I take notes, but never like a reporter. My stories are all based upon things that have come to me in life without my going out to look for them.”
“Talent Is Nothing Without Focus and Endurance”
“Fortunately, these two disciplines—focus and endurance—are different from talent, since they can be acquired and sharpened through training. You’ll naturally learn both concentration and endurance when you sit down every day at your desk and train yourself to focus on one point. This is a lot like the training of muscles I wrote of a moment ago. You have to continually transmit the object of your focus to your entire body, and make sure it thoroughly assimilates the information necessary for you to write every single day and concentrate on the work at hand. And gradually you’ll expand the limits of what you’re able to do. Almost imperceptibly you’ll make the bar rise. This involves the same process as jogging every day to strengthen your muscles and develop a runner’s physique. Add a stimulus and keep it up. And repeat. Patience is a must in this process, but I guarantee results will come.”
Final line of Ulysses by James Joyce.
“…I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
Seven and a half minutes worth of writing
reblogging nearsightedmonkey:
“People have been looking for the timing videos for Lynda Barry’s Writing the Unthinkable excercises. Here is the one for seven and a half minutes worth of writing.
OK LET’S GO! BUT BEFORE YOU START THE VIDEO….. STEP ONE:
First write ten nouns on ten little pieces of paper. Any nouns will do! Cake! Fire! Teeth! Ticket! Etc!
Number a page from one to ten
Relax your whole body from top to bottom and say the alphabet to yourself or something else you have memorized and think back to early days in your life….
turn over one of the pieces of paper and write down the first ten images… sort of like snapshots…. that come to you from that word
Read the list over
Circle one that seems vivid or has trouble in it and write it on a clean sheet of paper like it was a title to a story and then draw a big X on the page.
NOW start the video.”
Please Learn to Write
james joyce and the hotel porter
[Said Joyce:] ‘A German lady called to see me today. She is a writer and wanted me to give an opinion on her work, but she told me she had already shown it to the porter of the hotel where she stays. So I said to her: “What did your hotel porter think of your work?” She said: “He objected to a scene in my novel where my hero goes out into the forest, finds a locket of the girl he loves, picks it up and kisses it passionately.” “But,” I said, “that seems to me to be a very pleasing and touching incident. What did your hotel porter find wrong with it?” And then she tells me he said: “It’s all right for the hero to find the locket and to pick it up and kiss it, but before he kissed it you should have made him wipe the dirt off it with his coat sleeve.” ‘
I told her,’ said Joyce ‘(and I meant it too), to go back to that hotel porter and always to take his advice. “That man,” I said, “is a critical genius. There is nothing I can tell you that he can’t tell you.” ‘
— Frank Budgen (1934)
via ragbag
Ulysses
“She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.
Me. And me now.”
‘Stephen Lawrence’ by Carol Ann Duffy
Cold pavement indeed
the night you died,
murdered;
but the airborne drop of blood
from your wound
was a seed
your mother sowed
into hard ground –
your life’s length doubled,
unlived, stilled,
till one flower, thorned,
bloomed
in her hand,
love’s just blade.
Paul Greer 