When you started writing, in high school or college, it wasn’t out of a wish to be published, or to be successful… It was in response to the wondrousness and humiliation of being alive.
I never learned to drive. As a kid, I saw too many fatal accidents and I grew up hating the idea. Automobiles slaughter 40,000 people a year, maim a hundred thousand more, and bring out the worst in men. Any society where a natural man — the pedestrian — becomes the intruder, and an unnatural men encased in a steel shell becomes his molester, is a science fiction nightmare.
There are far worse things for a writer than being dismissed as a failure. Like being a huge, pandering success.
If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
Ray Bradbury (via myquotelibrary)
(via sufigeek)
Source: myquotelibrary
Isn’t it more interesting and useful to explore where exactly folks disagree?
The View From Somewhere - Conor Friedersdorf
I heart Conor.
Source: The Atlantic
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active. (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.
Politics and the English Language
I read this essay at least twice a year. And so should every serious writer.
Source: ebooks.adelaide.edu.au
When I say, “Talent is social,” I meant that, while good writing manifests itself as similarity to other good writing, talent per se can only manifest itself as difference.
Samuel R. Delany
About Writing
About Writing
[Junot Diaz’s] manic voice describes everything with the same faux energy, the ear-shattering ghetto volume, as though there were no difference between murder and puking.
ANY DICKHEAD WITH A BLUE SUIT CAN BE (AND IS) TAUGHT TO SAY “MAKE IT CLEARER”, AND “I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT HIM”.
BUT WHEN YOU’VE MADE IT SO CLEAR THAT EVEN THIS BLUE-SUITED PENGUIN IS HAPPY, BOTH YOU AND HE OR SHE WILL BE OUT OF A JOB.
HOW DOES ONE STRIKE THE BALANCE BETWEEN WITHHOLDING AND VOUCHSAFING INFORMATION? THAT IS THE ESSENTIAL TASK OF THE DRAMATIST. AND THE ABILITY TO DO THAT IS WHAT SEPARATES YOU FROM THE LESSER SPECIES IN THEIR BLUE SUITS.
FIGURE IT OUT.
Dramatize! David Mamet’s Master Class Memo to the Writers of The Unit
Good advice, and not just for TV writers.
Source: movieline.com
Real writers need frustration. They need embarrassment. They need cold, uncomfortable rooms, miles from a mobile signal. There should be an infestation of at least one parasite, a backlog of warnings from the Student Loans Company and just enough coffee for what Don DeLillo calls “an occasional revelation”.
Maybe they need to be homeless?
Does a room of one’s own really help you write a great novel?
Source: Guardian
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