story

And so to tame Christmas we spin myths to temper the story, we create our own caricatures to speak our own lines into the script, we gift ourselves to enhance an adventure now lagging, and we think we__e on a grand adventure when we__e completely forgotten what an adventure is.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, high-strung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths.

As I mentioned briefly on the phone, the best thing about the Air Chrysalis is that it's not an imitation of anyone. It has absolutely none of the usual new writer's sense of 'I want to be another so-and-so'. the syle, for sure, is rough,and the writing is clumsy. She even gets the title wrong: she's confusing 'chrysalis' and 'cocoon'. You could pick it apart completely if you wanted to. But the story itself has real power: it draws you in. the overall plots is a fantasy, but the descriptive details is incredibly real.The balance between the two is excellent. I don't know if words like 'originality' or Inevitability' fit here, and I suppose I might agree if someone insisted it's not at that level, but finally, after you work your way through the thing, with all its faults, it leaves a real impression- it gets to you in some strange, inexplicable way that may be a little disturbing.

We have story-makers and we have writers apparently most of the today's writing falls into the first category.

At the end of your story, you get down to the purity of it all. It__ like distilling something.

Every day sings its own song.

Storytelling keeps life going.

You paint the picture of your surroundings. Paint it beautifully.

I write because I love. I love because I write.

I always like the story behind the story more than the story itself.

I am free to write: therefore, I am free to be.

Take your ego out of your story.

Write out of love. Your piece will finish itself.

The story becomes clearer with time.

Everything is going to be all right. Miracles happen every day.

Let your story breathe and be what it really is.

Life is short. Write naked.