“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living, and the dead.”
-– James Joyce
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”
A page from the original handwritten and illustrated manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground by Lewis Carroll.
A Room of One’s Own
“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”
Dostoyevsky’s notes for chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov
On Talking Movies
“As soon as you put things in words, no one ever sees the film the same way. And that’s what I hate, you know. Talking — it’s real dangerous.”
via Liquid Night
Roald Dahl (and Hemingway) on writing.
“One of the vital things for a writer who’s writing a book, which is a lengthy project and is going to take about a year, is how to keep the momentum going. It is the same with a young person writing an essay. They have got to write four or five or six pages. But when you are writing for a year, you go away and have to come back. I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. To be confronted with a blank page is not very nice.
“But Hemingway, a great American writer, taught me the finest trick when doing a long book, which is, he simply said in his own words, “When you are going good, stop writing.” And that means that if everything’s going well and you know exactly where the end of the chapter’s going to go and you know just what the people are going to do, you don’t go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next? And you get up and you walk away and you don’t want to come back because you don’t know where you want to go.
“But if you stop when you’re going good, as Hemingway said…then you know what you are going to say next. You make yourself stop, put your pencil down and everything, and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next and that’s lovely and you have to try and do that. Every time, every day all the way through the year. If you stop when you are stuck, then you are in trouble!”
Edit 2018: I revisited this post to find the source of this quote as I did not originally provide a link. Consequently I found this post on SilverBirch Press which describes a bit more about the relationship between the two writers (there’s a phot too>).
“‘ARCHITECTURE IS FROZEN MUSIC.’ (This is, I think, the aesthetic key to the development of cartoons as an art form.)”
“What you do with comics, essentially, is take pieces of experience and freeze them in time,” Ware says. “The moments are inert, lying there on the page in the same way that sheet music lies on the printed page. In music you breathe life into the composition by playing it. In comics you make the strip come alive by reading it, by experiencing it beat by beat as you would playing music…”
“He wrote his plays to make money. “
1. Everyone – all levels of society – went to see Shakespeare’s plays. There weren’t many other forms of entertainment: no TV; no cable; no DVDs; no videos, hand-held electronic game players, or personal CD players; no CDs; no movies; and only the rudiments of a newspaper. People went to the bear-baiting or bull-baiting ring for a thrill, they went to a public execution or two – and they went to the theatre.
2. Shakespeare wrote his sonnets to be applauded and remembered as a writer. He wrote his plays to make money. And he made lots of it.
3. He wrote 37 plays, and some of them were real dogs.
4. Shakespeare’s wife was pregnant when they got married.
5. Shakespeare and his wife had three children before he left them all in Stratford-upon-Avon for the big-time, big-city life in London.
6. Shakespeare never went to college.
7. Reading Shakespeare is hard. Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed – acted and seen on a stage. About half of Shakespeare’s plays weren’t even published until after his death.
8. In Shakespeare’s time, a woman’s value depended solely on who her husband was, and how valuable he was.
9. Experiencing a play in the Globe Theatre in 1603 was sort of a cross between going to an Oscar de la Hoya fight and an N Sync concert.
10. In Shakespeare’s plays, you can find drunks, ghosts, teenagers running away from home, boy who gets girl, boy who loses girl, king who loses everything, woman caressing her lover’s body that is minus its head, woman caressing her lover’s head that is minus its body, weddings and celebrations, and murder by stabbing, suffocation, poison, decapitation, and drowning in a vat of wine.
– Peggy O’Brien, from the “Acknowledgments” section of The Shakespeare Book of Lists by Michael LoMonico
Paul Greer 