- “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” — Mark Twain
- “I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.” — Clarice Lispector
- “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” — Virginia Woolf
- “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
- “The first draft of anything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway
- “Always be a poet, even in prose.” — Charles Baudelaire
- “Literature — creative literature — unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.” — Gertrude Stein
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.” — Alain Robbe-Grillet
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “Reading is more important than writing.” — Roberto Bolaño
- “The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.” — Ezra Pound
- “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
- “The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- “We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.” — Vladimir Nabokov
- “…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
- “The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.” — Walt Whitman
- “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
- “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
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Ruby Sparks marketing blah blah
I watched the preview for Ruby Sparks last night. Could be ok, or could be a steaming pile, hard to tell with this kind of movie. Movies about writers are catnip to me, but the catnip usually turns out to be poison ivy. Paul Dano, though.
The website for the movie wants you to type like you’re Paul Dano, and whatever you type floats across the screen in a magical HTML5 swirly-thing, while someone asks “Have you tried writing more?” over and over and over and eventually you get to create your own poster for the Tumblr, which brings us back to doing promotional work for the people getting paid to do it, like this.
I submitted the picture of Romney dressed like Bane, with the caption “He’s out of his mind.” I give my effort two stars out of five and fully expect it to never see the light of day, but if it gets approved and I win the contest (what do I win? I have no idea) I’ll take all of you to see the movie. Void where prohibited.
Using Social Media to Inspire Concise Writing
Overview | How can online media like Twitter posts, Facebook status updates and text messages be harnessed to inspire and guide concise writing? In this lesson, students read, respond to and write brief fiction and nonfiction stories, and reflect on the benefits and drawbacks of “writing short.”
RELATED AND POTENTIALLY LUCRATIVE ADDENDUM: Let the New York Times teach you how to write for the New York Times! It’s like a want-ad for the overly optimistic.
Surprisingly often they use the phrase “You changed my life.” I don’t take that to mean that they found Buddhist enlightenment or quit smoking. What they mainly mean is that I cleaned out the sludge in their thinking that had paralyzed them from doing writing of any kind—a phobia not unlike the fear of cleaning out the closets or the basement.
This quote is from William Zinsser’s essay from the Spring 2009 issue of The American Scholar about writing and rewriting his book On Writing Well.
Tillie Olsen was forty-nine when Tell Me a Riddle was published. After writing the stories in it and publishing them in journals, Olsen won lucrative grants and fellowships. Publishers twice gave her contracts for novels (back in the thirties, Bennett Cerf, at Random House, worked hard to get her to write, and provided over a thousand dollars as an advance to support her meanwhile). Olsen repeatedly told her publishers she was almost done with a novel, but she never completed one, or any stories except for those four. She promised to write, accepted money to write, but didn’t write. Reid describes these periods as if Tillie Olsen was making irresponsible choices, but any reader who has tried writing a novel will guess how much pain she must have felt.
Howdy there,
I hope the weekend is ! I’m just getting in touch to ask if you’re in need of any freelance writing at Condalm - if so, it’d be an honor to help out and I would love to get involved if you have any need for me.
Received this email offer of “professional copywriting” a few minutes ago.
No, thank yo.