The main thing is to write. Yes, read, a lot, all the time, anything you can get your hands on. Yes, live, gain some experience, do something meaningful.
But, on top of it all, write.
Today: typing up my handwritten story. Printer: running low on ink. Will need to mooch.
Fifteen pages of story typed.
God, let this consume me. Let it consume my life. I think that’s a personal requirement if I’m going to get this anywhere decent (Damn you, finals! Quit taking up my time!).
TED Talk for Writers, Musicians, Actors, Artists.
Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius.
-thanks to @m4quinon for sending me the linkVery interesting talk. I haven’t read any of her work but I think she makes some valid points, the most important being how she doesn’t believe that artists have to suffer in order to create their art, and that the term “genius” when it is applied to certain people can be a very destructive thing. If you watch this predatorywaspobserver, I’d like to know your thoughts.
This is brilliance!
Writers aren’t born, they’re made—from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine. And sometimes tutelage. Novelist ALEXANDER CHEE recounts studying with Annie Dillard, learning lessons from a master.
Yes! Precisely!
I finished typing and printing tons of chapters yesterday, which I’d been working on for the past 2 days (Monday doesn’t count - things were so hectic, I only got time to do some longhand).
It’s coming together! I think that has to be one of the more exciting things about being a writer - watching all the pieces of your work come together that were previously so far apart.
Also, I have to work on the Fantasy Big Bang for LJ, since I only have about 50 words for that so far (don’t hurt me!). 8K is not a lot, and I have a little more than 3 months to do it, but it’s one of those things that I’d have to make a committment to. Let me now direct your attention to 6 Tricks for Writing When You Don’t Feel Like It!
I love writer blogs.
And now for your near-daily dose of Goblin Market:
Lizzie met her at the gate
Full of wise upbraidings:
“Dear, you should not stay so late,
Twilight is not good for maidens;
Should not loiter in the glen
In the haunts of goblin men.
Do you not remember Jeanie,
How she met them in the moonlight,
Took their gifts both choice and many,
Ate their fruits and wore their flowers
Plucked from bowers
Where summer ripens at all hours?
But ever in the moonlight
She pined and pined away;
Sought them by night and day,
Found them no more, but dwindled and grew gray;
Then fell with the first snow,
While to this day no grass will grow
Where she lies low:
I planted daisies there a year ago
That never blow.
You should not loiter so.”
“Nay hush,” said Laura.
“Nay hush, my sister:
I ate and ate my fill,
Yet my mouth waters still;
To-morrow night I will
Buy more,” and kissed her.
“Have done with sorrow;
I’ll bring you plums to-morrow
Fresh on their mother twigs,
Cherries worth getting;
You cannot think what figs
My teeth have met in,
What melons, icy-cold
Piled on a dish of gold
Too huge for me to hold,
What peaches with a velvet nap,
Pellucid grapes without one seed:
Odorous indeed must be the mead
Whereon they grow, and pure the wave they drink,
With lilies at the brink,
And sugar-sweet their sap.”
They helped me qualify for my scholarship by reblogging my photograph about spreading awareness regarding third world illiteracy (see previous posts) and as promised, I checked out their blogs. You should too!
http://therighttobelazy.tumblr.com/
![lettersandsongs:
Anne Rowling died in 1990, she never knew about Harry Potter, or the phenomenal success her daughter was about to enjoy. The death of Joanne Rowling’s mother was to have a profound effect on her writing, in many ways the whole of Harry Potter is one giant attempt to reclaim a childhood.“I’ve been writing for 6 months before she died. The weird thing is the essential plot didn’t change after my mother died, but everything deepened and darkened […] it seeped into every part of the books. I think in retrospect, now I finished I see just how much it formed everything.”
J.K. Rowling: A Year in a Life
For me, this combination of images and phrases is extremely powerful. Forgive me if I read far too much into this, but they (both creator and character) are essentially asking the same thing of the people they loved in their own worlds. In addition to that, due to the combination of the pictures and the sentences, Harry is asking his creator, his God, if you will, to stay with him. She didn’t give up on him throughout all of the other six books, and she will see him through the most tumultuous time in his life. In a way, they have one another - Harry holds the hand of the God that created him, and Jo holds the hand of one of the few (though fictional) people who really knows what it’s like to lose someone and to want them back, and to ask someone you love to stay with you, and to have someone who loves you promise to stay. Again, maybe I’m reading too much into this, but they are each asking the other this question: “You’ll stay with me?” and each responding “Until the very end.”
I think this is true with writers in general - your characters never leave you, and you essentially never leave them. It’s just a thought, but I wanted to explain why this makes me cry every time I see it without simply saying that I tear up. :)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lc2kp5SjGe1qavxvko1_500.png)
Anne Rowling died in 1990, she never knew about Harry Potter, or the phenomenal success her daughter was about to enjoy. The death of Joanne Rowling’s mother was to have a profound effect on her writing, in many ways the whole of Harry Potter is one giant attempt to reclaim a childhood.
“I’ve been writing for 6 months before she died. The weird thing is the essential plot didn’t change after my mother died, but everything deepened and darkened […] it seeped into every part of the books. I think in retrospect, now I finished I see just how much it formed everything.”J.K. Rowling: A Year in a Life
For me, this combination of images and phrases is extremely powerful. Forgive me if I read far too much into this, but they (both creator and character) are essentially asking the same thing of the people they loved in their own worlds. In addition to that, due to the combination of the pictures and the sentences, Harry is asking his creator, his God, if you will, to stay with him. She didn’t give up on him throughout all of the other six books, and she will see him through the most tumultuous time in his life. In a way, they have one another - Harry holds the hand of the God that created him, and Jo holds the hand of one of the few (though fictional) people who really knows what it’s like to lose someone and to want them back, and to ask someone you love to stay with you, and to have someone who loves you promise to stay. Again, maybe I’m reading too much into this, but they are each asking the other this question: “You’ll stay with me?” and each responding “Until the very end.”
I think this is true with writers in general - your characters never leave you, and you essentially never leave them. It’s just a thought, but I wanted to explain why this makes me cry every time I see it without simply saying that I tear up. :)
