writers-on-writing

This is a forum for readers. Authors walk these halls at their own risk. I__e been to the Coliseum in Rome. GR is just that. Books are gladiators. Readers are ravenous citizens awaiting their next bite of entertainment, all Caesars with thumbs readied for judgement. Even champions fall prey to sword now and then. And you know what they say about the pen and the sword_the analogy is a bit muddled, but it__ in there somewhere.

I write to remind me of the experiences, fictional or non-fictional, that flows a bit of selfless truths. For the me in the ___, or the me through your eyeballs, it is a serum to separate the lumpiness in my heart.

If you don__ write your memoirs down then time will swallow them up, leaving no leftovers.

Writers have to be tenacious to the point of being pathological. Rejection and criticism is assured.

For nearly two centuries the popular spirit of each succeeding generation has tended more and more to the view that the mysteries of life will eventually fall before the mind of man. Many modern novelists have been more concerned with the processes of consciousness than with the objective world outside the mind. In twentieth-century fiction it increasingly happens that a meaningless, absurd world impinges upon the sacred consciousness of author or character; author and character seldom now go out to explore and penetrate a world in which the sacred is reflected.

Writing is like riding a bike. Once you gain momentum, the hills are easier. Editing, however, requires a motor and some horsepower.

I have never known anything to be as exquisite or as excruciating as the Love-Hate relationship I have with writing.

Before cruelly vilifying them from a great height, the mudslingers at newspapers and journals should bear in mind that all artistic endeavors were by and large a mixture of effort and imagination, the embodiment of a solitary endeavor, of a sometimes long-nurtured dream, when they were not a desperate bid to give life meaning.

A good story is one liked. A great story is one that challenges thought, defiant and gets mouths talking.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let m crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and i hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

Anyone who writes books is at least mostly an introvert. It__ amazing to be able to share that internalized part of myself, that little world that no one really knows about. I just wrote down it down on a piece of paper just to be crazy, and people loving that is so strange.

There is no value in your promises. They are as hollow as fangs and poisonous as the venom within them once I allowed them into my heart.

A voice is a product of the writer__ own Pandora Box of insight, insecurities, bravado, modesty, humility, affection, understanding, and confidence. In short, a voice reflects the writers_ sangfroid. The tenor of the writer__ voice also reflects their insecurities, self-doubt, egotism, testiness, and the ability to identify with their mental and physical infirmities. The inflection that distinguishes a writer__ pitch from other wordsmiths_ tone reflects their collective lifetime of mundane, tranquil, disturbing, and passionate experiences.

Now memories have an unusual way of coming back to you in the middle of a day.

I don__ so much hope that any reader __grees_ with me, as I hope to haunt them, to trouble their sense of how things actually are.

Isolation is a gift. Everything else is just a test of your endurance. You will be alone with the Gods. Your nights will flame with fire.

Every year hundreds of books, many of considerable merit, pass unnoticed. Each one has taken the author months to write, he may have had it in his mind for years; he has put into it something of himself which is lost forever, it is heart-rending to think how great are the chances that it will be disregarded.