Satisfy yourself first. That way you know at least one person had a good time. (This is only true for storytelling; it is exactly the opposite for sex.)
– David Gerrold
Tag: writing
Quotable 25
I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten — happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
– Brenda Ueland
Pen to Paper: Finding Time to Write
“Bryon, how do you write a short story — and a haiku — every week? How do you find the time for such creativity?”
I get asked this question a lot. Every time I daydream about being a Famous Author standing in front of an auditorium filled to overflowing with fans, someone at one of the microphones set up for questions asks me this.
The answer is simple. I have decided that I will commit this sort of creativity on a weekly basis. That means there are other things I will not do because they would take up the time I require for thinking and dreaming and observing and writing.
Quotable 24
Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.
– Jane Yolen
Quotable 21
The communication of our thoughts by means of language, whether spoken or written, constitutes a peculiar art, which cannot be acquired in any perfection but by long-continued practice.
– Peter M. Roget
Pen to Paper: Mark Twain’s Writing Advice
Mark Twain is back in the news, not that he ever really left it. His unexpurgated autobiography is being published shortly, and I expect more than a few graveyards will hum with all the spinning some of the residents will be doing. (N.B.: I wrote the phrase “unexpurgated autobiography” before hunting up the NYT article that also uses it. Great minds, and all that.)
Twain had something to say about most everything, and he certainly did not spare his own field. He left us a great many thoughts on what makes a good story. Here is one collection of those thoughts. Finally, we have his masterful blast against novelist James Fenimore Cooper. Early on, Twain gives us twelve solid notions of what a writer should and should not do, and he makes note of how Cooper violated these points of literary order.
Enjoy, and make good use of what the old master taught us.
Quotable 9
Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.
– Don DeLillo
Quotable 8
Writing fiction is writing life. Except characters don’t go to the bathroom as often.
– Peter Bognanni
Quotable 6
If your love is writing books, that’s a passion that’s way outside of the umbrella of income.
– Walter Mosely
Pen to Paper: Writing vs. Paying the Bills
The readily available evidence indicates that writing fiction for a living is becoming less of an option for those of us with expensive tastes such as food and shelter. The raw numbers can be seen here: Book Advances, Royalty Checks, and Making a Living as a Writer, by Adriann Ranta. It looks easier to win a lottery jackpot with an expired ticket. Some few will always be able to make it happen, of course, but they will increasingly be the exceptions to the rule.
Where does this lead us? Directly to Working the Double Shift, by Emily St. John Mandel. She writes about treating writing as a second job, which makes sense to me. It’s not as glamorous, but it’s practical in terms of money and perhaps in terms of finding things and people to write about, or in letting our subconscious work on a story while we earn the house payment.
Finally, Lapham’s Quarterly assures us that even great writers have held day jobs, so we need not feel badly about the necessity ourselves. (From the world of science, a reminder that Albert Einstein was working in a Swiss patent office when he wrote his groundbreaking papers on light quanta, Brownian motion, and special relativity. Perhaps a mind-numbing job for part of the day can lead to a burst of creativity at other times.)