“Asking your work to prove anything only invites doom.” – Art & Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland I have detractors. It’s good. Everyone needs at least a few. I’ve been saving them up for a while now. All my life I’ve collected resentment for people who tried to keep me down, tried to control me, tried to use me for
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“One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.” – Cynthia Ozick Avoid ambition? Is that even possible? It’s always seemed to me it takes a
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“Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.” – Rita Mae Brown Writing is editing. You know that. You accept that. But do you love it? I’m serious. It’s easy to love writing, even when you don’t. But editing? Who loves that? And yet, if you plan to continue your career as a writer, it may be time to learn. When people ask me about
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I think it’s time we talked about our language. Over the next few posts, I want to look at how we treat it, what we really think about language, and how we might improve our uses of it. Take Isaiah 64:6: “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
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