I generally don’t post these they often contain too much personal stuff. I’ll try to get over
writing
/ˈrʌɪtɪŋ/
noun
1. the activity or skill of writing.
“parents want schools to concentrate on reading, writing, and arithmetic”
2. the activity or occupation of composing text for publication.
“she made a decent living from writing”
The 25 Greatest Quotes About Writing »
reblogging nevver:
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“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” — Mark Twain
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“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.” — Clarice Lispector
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“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” — Virginia Woolf
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“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” — James Joyce
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“The first draft of anything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway
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“Always be a poet, even in prose.” — Charles Baudelaire
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“Literature — creative literature — unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.” — Gertrude Stein
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“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” — Anaïs Nin
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“One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.” — Henry Miller
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“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
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“The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.” — Alain Robbe-Grillet
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“James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.” — Samuel Beckett
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“Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.” — Michel Houellebecq
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“Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?” — Kurt Vonnegut
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“Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.” — Julio Cortázar
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“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” — Franz Kafka
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“Reading is more important than writing.” — Roberto Bolaño
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“The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.” — Ezra Pound
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“The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.” — David Foster Wallace
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“The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.” — Vladimir Nabokov
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“…Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. — And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
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“The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.” — Walt Whitman
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“All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.” — Samuel Beckett
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“Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It’s never been anything but your religion. Never. I’m a little overexcited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won’t be asked. You won’t be asked if you were working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won’t be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won’t be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won’t even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished—I think only poor Soren K. will get asked that. I’m so sure you’ll only get asked two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. ” — J.D. Salinger
Moving In
Due to my concerned over putting all my internets in one basket and the fact that Google miffed me off because they’re closing Reader, I decided to port my slowblog onto WordPress.
I don’t have much time so the operation has been a tad clumsy. I also decided to prune some of the weaker posts so some of the links might not work, but eventually it should get there.
Kettle’s on, make yourself at home.
(PS – if you can see the ad, apologies, I’ll get that sorted in due course. Early days.)
“I’ll just go ahead and do it anyway.”
“Unfortunately the little artists within us are choked to death before we get to fight against the oppressors of art. They get locked in. That’s our tragedy.
So what happens when little artists get locked in, banished or even killed? Our artistic desire doesn’t go away. We want to express, to reveal ourselves… The artistic impulses inside of us are suppressed but not gone.
They can often reveal themselves negatively in the form of jealously. You know the song, “I Would Love to be on TV”? Why would we love it?
TV is full of people who do what we wished to do but never got to. They dance, they act, the more they do the more they are praised. So we start to envy them. We become dictators with a remote and start to criticize the people on TV. “He just can’t act.” “You call that singing?” “She can’t hit the notes.”We easily say these sorts of things. We get jealous not because we are evil but because we have little artists pent up inside of us. That’s what I think. What should we do? Right now we need to start our own art. Right this minute. Turn off the TV. Log off the internet. Get up and start to do something….
… In my writing class I give students a special assignment. I have students like you in the class, many who don’t major in writing. Some major in art or music and think they can’t write so I give them a blank sheet of paper and a theme: Write about the most unfortunate experience in your childhood. There’s one condition. You must write like crazy. Like crazy! I walk around and encourage them. “Come on! Come on!” They have to write like crazy for an hour or two. They only get to think for the first five minutes.
The reason I make them write like crazy is because when you write slowly lots of thoughts cross your mind. The artistic devil creeps in. The devil will tell you hundreds of reasons why you can’t write. “People will laugh at you. This is not good writing. What kind of sentence is this? Look at your handwriting!” It will say a lot of things. You have to run so fast the devil can’t catch up.
The really good writing I’ve seen in my class was not from the assignments with a long deadline but from the 40 to 60 minutes they write without knowing what they are writing. And at this moment the nagging devil disappears.
So I can say this: It’s not the hundreds of reasons why one can’t be an artist, but rather the one reason one must be that makes us artists. Why we cannot be something is not important. Most artists become artists because of the one reason.
When we put the devil in our heart to sleep and start our own art enemies appear on the outside. Mostly they have the faces of our parents or our spouses. But they are devils. Devils. They come to earth briefly transformed to stop you from being artistic, from becoming artists. And they have a magic question: “What for?”
But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal. It saves our souls and makes us live happily. So in response to such a pragmatic question, we need to be bold: “Well, just for the fun of it. Sorry to have fun without you.” that’s what you should say.
“I’ll just go ahead and do it anyway.”
An Evening with Ray Bradbury 2001
see also: What I have to Offer
The Importance of Keeping a Journal: Anaïs Nin
reblogging amandaonwriting:
“This diary is my kief, hashish, and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice. Instead of writing a novel, I lie back with this book and a pen, and dream, and indulge in refractions and defractions… I must relive my life in the dream. The dream is my only life. I see in the echoes and reverberations, the transfigurations which alone keep wonder pure. Otherwise all magic is lost. Otherwise life shows its deformities and the homeliness becomes rust… All matter must be fused this way through the lens of my vice or the rust of living would slow down my rhythm to a sob.”
~From The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 1.“The diary taught me that it is in the moments of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately. I learned to choose the heightened moments because they are the moments of revelation.”
~From Nin’s essay On Writing, 1947.From Flavorwire
On Mind Maps and Dyslexia
Why do I need mind-maps?
“There are a few things you need to know:
First, I am lucky enough to have a number of positive impacts of dyslexia. One of those is that once I have acquired new information I can process it very rapidly and often have multiple thoughts at once. That often means that I can solve the most complex problems faster than others.
Second, I have a problem writing and thinking at the same time. I believe it is to do with short-term memory. However, the bottom line is that I keep forgetting where I am in the overall flow of the thing that I am writing. As a result, my writing meanders and needs to be edited (by me) again and again until it finally expresses what I mean.
Thirdly, I see patterns in things – often before others. I use that to form and then set out compelling arguments and explanations that become very clear to readers.
Finally, I have a fairly precise use of language and so – whilst not finding it easy to write – am a fierce critic of my own work. So that means the editing can take a very long time.”
No writing is wasted.
“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.”
— Erin Bow
Neil Gaiman’s New Year’s Wish…
“It’s a New Year and with it comes a fresh opportunity to shape our world.
So this is my wish, a wish for me as much as it is a wish for you: in the world to come, let us be brave – let us walk into the dark without fear, and step into the unknown with smiles on our faces, even if we’re faking them.
And whatever happens to us, whatever we make, whatever we learn, let us take joy in it. We can find joy in the world if it’s joy we’re looking for, we can take joy in the act of creation.
So that is my wish for you, and for me. Bravery and joy.”
— via
Paul Greer 