“Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”
~ Jorge Luis Borges, b. 24 August 1899
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Writing: Lock yourself away…
21 Aug
“The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It’s not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.”
~ AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS
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HP Lovecraft (b. August 20): “Pleasure to me is wonder…”
20 Aug
“Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty.”
~ HP Lovecraft, b. 20 August 1890
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Writing: Jonathan Franzen’s 10 rules…
17 Aug
1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
2. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
3. Never use the word “then” as a conjunction–we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.
4. Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
6. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto biographical story than “The Metamorphosis”.
7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.
8. It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10. You have to love before you can be relentless.
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Writing: “You expect far too much of a first sentence…”
16 Aug
“You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.”
~ LARRY McMURTRY
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Writing: “You have to let a story go…”
15 Aug
“There’s always a point where you have to let a story go. Art isn’t finished, as many people before me have pointed out, only abandoned. And eventually you abandon your new child and hope that you’ll get it right next time, or the time after that, and you never do.”
~ NEIL GAIMAN
Writing: “Forget every rule…”
14 Aug
“Forget every rule Syd Field, Robert McKee or any other screenwriting guru ever taught you. Except one: Never be boring.”
~ DAVID MAMET
Percy Bysshe Shelley (b. August 4): “Poetry is a mirror…”
4 Aug
“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, b. 4 August 1792
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Ernest Hemingway (b. July 21): “We are all apprentices…”
21 Jul
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
~ Ernest Hemingway, b. 21 July 1899
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