Tag Archives: writers
Another Perspective on Why Writers Write
I am all about the somethingness. Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.
“The writer must not really know what he is knowing, what he is learning to know when he writes, which is more than the knowing of it. A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light. The writer is separate from his work but that’s all the writer is – what he writes. A writer must be smart but not too smart. He must be reckless and patient and daring and dull – for what is duller than writing, trying to …
In a status message world, there's a fine line between pithy and concise.
Sentences come to me in the middle of the night. Perfect opening lines find me in the shower.
A string of words that I imagine will become the well loved and much quoted words of the perfect ending to The Great American Novel pop into my head as I drive to the gym.
I can’t turn it off. I don’t want to turn it off.
But lately, I find the inner voice is distracted, slightly disembodied. The single sentence shudders to a halt. The string of words doesn’t have a wrap to the unwritten beginning.
My brain is writing status …
Only in a restroom in Cusseta, Alabama.
Writers see the world… differently.
It looks kind of like this:
EVERYTHING IS, HAS, WAS, WILL OR CAN BE A STORY.
Just as everyone you meet is a potential character and every conversation you hear may be stored away for later use. Having a writer as a friend can be dangerous, partying with fellow writers fills my well. (Hello Southampton friends!)
It is so nice when people “get you,” when explanations are unnecessary and when you can experience truly witty parlay.
So, it will come as no surprise to my writing friends that I found a story in a restroom …
Poe blames it on the Juleps. What's your excuse?
Edgar Allan Poe apologizes to his publishers for drinking too much and asks them to buy an article because he’s “desperately pushed for money” in an 1842 letter acquired by the University of Virginia for an exhibition marking the author’s 200th birthday.
Writing from Philadelphia, Poe blames his friend William Ross Wallace, a poet and lawyer, for making him drink too many “juleps” and for misbehaving on a visit to New York.
“Will you be so kind enough to put the best possible interpretation upon my behaviour while in N-York?,” Poe asks New York publishers J. and Henry G. Langley. …
Insanity is super sanity.
“For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.“
Jean Dubuffet
I love that. After a week of writing, getting lost in alternate worlds and spending more time in my head puzzle solving, inventing and musing, it can be hard to bring myself back to reality- in whatever form. Though I will never be as bizarre as the artists below, I love them for their creativity, for their imagination, for their bravery. I wish I had more friends like that, people who understand that it’s much too easy to be …
Still Chasing the Dream
While packing for my recent writing conference in Florida, I did the three things any smart gal does: check weather.com’s extended forecast, choose the prettiest shoes, and bring lots of books. I was ready for some sunshine, as Atlanta’s teaser of Spring went from 60 degree days to 30 degree days and I hate being teased.
The conference was called Sleuthfest, sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America, the Florida Chapter and was geared to the detective/police/PI/thriller/suspense market… more suited for the novel I’m almost done with, not really the one I wanted to pitch, but the agent list was …
Wise Words to the Novelist
Alice Hoffman said,
“For me, a novel isn’t autobiographical in “real time” – but my life is there, transfigured by fiction. I think of a novel the way analysts deconstruct a dream – the dreamer is every character in his or her dream, including the cat and the dog. Or, think of it this way: Your life is a mirror. You throw it down on the ground. It shatters into thousands of pieces. You can never recreate the mirror as it was, but each piece is still a part of the mirror, a part of the writer’s life.
For me, …
Write What You Know. Then Watch It.
Let’s face it. Writers are interesting people.
Of course Hollywood has cashed in on this. Besides, when you’re a writer, one of the first things you’ll find yourself doing when you sit down to the keyboard…is writing about what you’re doing.
( I can’t tell you how many bad stories I read every week that open with a conflicted author who becomes his character, or loses his mind. Then there are the stories that open with someone reading or writing the story you’re about to read, or keeping a journal, or finding a diary, or writing a script or … …
