thought for the week

thought for the week

~ jama ~ 8 Comments

 

“In the every day there are so many amazing surprises, so many ways to look at things. I love that. There’s always a temptation to write in broad strokes, hoping to define something universal, but the beauty in life, I think, comes from individual reactions and values and what they tell us about character, and what they tell us about ourselves. Sometimes those come from surprising angles. 

For example, my Grammy Barnard would cry over the beauty and miracle of a ripe, good-looking tomato. That says a lot about her. Our reactions to her tears tell us a lot about ourselves. That’s something really specific, but it creates much broader strokes about values and the human condition. I think that as writers we have a responsibility to examine the specifics and the surprises as a way to touch the universal.” 
                              ~ Carrie Jones, author 
                                    (from the 2008 Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market)
 

thought for the week

~ jama ~ 8 Comments

“As a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin  
 

thought for the week

~ jama ~ 16 Comments

 

             

“As you work further, you are faced more and more with the fact that it’s not going to be everything. You try to make this as good as it can be, but it’s not going to encompass the whole world. That’s where the disillusionment sets in.” 
                                                                          ~ Mona Simpson           

Perfectionism paralyzes writers. Sooner or later, you come to terms with the fact that your work will not be all that you hoped and imagined. 

This is as it should be. NO writing should commence without broad dreams and high ambitions.

Let the scaling down come as you work, not before.

Your work, patiently pursued, will ground itself of its own accord. It will gradually show you its limitations and compromises. Because we are humans, no perfectly achieved project is possible or even desirable.

Disillusion is a natural stage that follows the holding of an illusion. How could you start a large project without an 
illusion — an image of what it might be? How could you complete it without a gradual coming down to earth?

Don’t make your compromises and adjustments in advance. Let them come as you work.

        ~ from Walking on Alligators: A Book of Meditations for Writers
         by Susan Shaughnessy  (Harper, 1993) 

thought for the week

~ jama ~ 2 Comments

 
         

“For in addition to following the cycles of life, I chronicle it. While there is not a typewriter, telephone, dictionary, or cool glass of lemonade by my hand, I have learned that wherever I am, I must tender that other life, the one of observation, play, imprint and desire that walks with me across the rolling hills beneath the shadows of the clouds. Like the young shoots that thrive in our alkaline soil, the words of my mind must be planted, hoed, watered, thinned and weeded to yield a bumper crop.”  ~ Wanda Rosseland 

thought for the week

~ jama ~ 11 Comments

        

“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words all being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. You might, if you chose, develop any part of the picture, for the idea of sequence does not really exist as far as the author is concerned. Sequence arises only because words have to be written one after the other on consecutive pages, just as the reader’s mind must have time to go through the book, at least the first time he reads it. If the mind were constructed on optional lines and if a book could be read in the same way as a painting is taken in by the eye, that is, without the bother of working from left to right, and without the absurdity of beginnings and ends, this would be the ideal way of appreciating a novel, for thus the author saw it at the moment of conception.”
                                                              ~ Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1997)