“This man, I think, wanted to enchant the reader, to set in words certain amorphous and important sensations he had experienced…. “He wanted to transcribe his own inchoate experience. He wanted it to become art. He felt, as many of us do, that he had a right to that. Perhaps he wanted to feel his suffering had been worthwhile, was
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A writer's motivation, Books, Inspiration, Meditations, Monday Motivations, On High Quality, One Thousand Gifts, Spiritual, Stories, The craft, Useful, Writing • Tags: inspiration, pressing on, remembering, stories, storytelling, truth • Comment feed RSS 2.0 - Read this post
“…I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a fancy way of saying I started writing.” I taught fiction at Mt. Hermon last week. The most
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A writer's motivation, Fear, Keys to Success, Monday Motivations, Personality, Spiritual, Stories, The craft, Writing • Tags: crafting fiction, motivation, storytelling, writing characters • Comment feed RSS 2.0 - Read this post
High stakes yield high success. Donald Maass If you’re working to write or edit a book, you naturally want to know how you can improve the read. In all the books I edit, I try to serve as a careful reader and one of my primary considerations is always whether the story has enough of a sense of danger
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A writer's motivation, Stories, The craft, Writing • Tags: conveying fear, raising the stakes, storytelling, writing • Comment feed RSS 2.0 - Read this post
“I had been forever altered by our brush with catastrophe….My instrument had changed. And I now understood that it would continue to change. That there would be more befores and afters ahead. Fighting it was futile, impossible. Accepting, even embracing this, was the true work, not only of being a writer, but of being alive.” – Dani Shapiro, Still Writing
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Monday Motivations • Tags: character plot setting, Christian writing, second golden rule, storytelling, writing • Comment feed RSS 2.0 - Read this post
I’ve been collecting quotes for my upcoming story course. Some are fairly alarming. First, from Nabokov: “Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no
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A writer's motivation, Stories, Writing • Tags: E.L. Doctorow, literature, storytelling, Vladimir Nabokov • Comment feed RSS 2.0 - Read this post
