writing-craft

Doubt is the only reliable source of creativity.

A good writer reveals beauty in the mundane and truth in tragedy. Words are a tool; a currency of the mind, and the best writers weave passages into our hearts that our bones remember.

T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

Never place your punch at the beginning of a column nor at the end. Sneak it in where it's least expected. Fill a whole column with drivel, just to get in that one important line.

Writing is work. It__ also gambling. You don__ get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you__e on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don__ whine.

One of the key secrets of great writing is knowing where to start and when to stop.

No writing is effortless. I__ not saying you can__ have a good day where the words just kind of flow, but even those words have to be edited. Probably more than once. And I__ not saying a character hasn__ somehow gone in a different direction that I wanted her to go, but that was me, not her. I let her get away from me. I let her roam free and nine times out of ten, the result is not good. I have to go back and start over because she veered off the path of my book. She changed the vision. And I did that. Not her.

Travel became distinguishable from pain and began to be regarded as an intellectual pleasur...These factors--the voluntariness of departure, the freedom implicit in the indeterminancies of mobility, the pleasure of travel free from necessity, the notion that travel signifies autonomy and is a means for demonstrating what one 'really' is independent of one context or set of defining associations--remain the characteristics of the modern conception of travel.Eric Leed

However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.

... yes I speak a different language - the dark fire of poetry - it flutters and gutters in tune with the mood...

Don__ polish it forever, put it out there. At some point the changes aren__ improvements, they__e just changes.

My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vivdness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie....

From school desks with inkwells and scratchy nibs on paper to sweaty finger prints on a tablet... technology progression yes... style?

Inspiration is the crèche of your brainchildren. If you don__ feed them, they will die, and never come back. So someone please think about the children!

Bye-bye. Nice knowing you. But if you are waiting for that perfect idea to strike like lightning during a dust storm (I live in New Mexico), you could be waiting a long time. Ideas are everywhere. EVERYWHERE. I can__ walk to the bathroom without being hit with another idea. It__ what you DO with that idea that matters. Here is your mantra: BICHOK, BICHOK, BICHOKTranslation: Butt in chair, hands on keys. Just write. Every stinking day.

The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination

Write what is important to you, regardless of fashion or marketability or anything like that _ all those things are so far out of your control that you may as well not think about them. Of course, this may mean you__l never be published but that__ a risk we all take every single time we set hands to keyboard or pen to paper. For me, if I can sit back at the end of a project and say, __es, I stayed honest, I said what I wanted to say, and I made it sing to the best of my ability_, then I__ happy enough. Of course, if anyone wants to buy the damned thing off me when I__ done, that__ jam I won__ refuse.

Doing it all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability. It takes it out of the realm of conjuring where we stand on the rock of isolation, begging the winds for inspiration, and it makes it something as do-able as picking up a hammer and pounding a nail. Writing may be an art, but it is certainly a craft. It is a simple and workable thing that can be as steady and reliable as a chore__oes that ruin the romance?