Alex Burns
@alexgraceburns
Alex Burns
- “Write from the scar, not the wound” the old saying goes. Share only from scar tissue once it’s all healed over and you’re strong enough to withstand any poking. A memoir is not a diary; it is not a big messy cake, it’s more like something that’s been moulded using those metal cookie cutter shapes. Selected, crafted, arranged for consumption.
from #60 A Slow Sunday Scroll ☕️
- Have killer voice. How do you develop killer voice? Be confident. How do you develop confidence? Read oodles and write oodles more. If you’re sending a “list newsletter” you better have one hell of a point of view because, well, there are oodles-upon-oodles of list newsletters out there. Generally, like with much good writing, the magic for readers
... See morefrom On Being a Good Newsletterer
- fiction is made out of experience, your whole life from infancy on, everything you’ve thought and done and seen and read and dreamed. But experience isn’t something you go and get—it’s a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to... See more
from Ursula K. Le Guin on How to Become a Writer by Ursula K. Le Guin May 24
- “When I was a young writer,” Neil Gaiman reflected in View from the cheap seats , “ I liked to imagine that I was paying someone for every word I wrote, rather than being paid for it; it was a fine way to discipline myself only to use those words I needed.”
from Reflections on Writing, Grinding, and Money
- Almost everything about the concept of “writer’s block” irritates me. The supposed greatest obstacle to success or productivity is structured so passively you’d think it was written by the New York Times trying to describe civilian death. “Writer’s block.” What exactly is being blocked and by whom? The process of writing — not writing well, just wr... See more
from The Myth of Writer's Block
- Gornick, again: “Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand.”
from ౨ৎ Girl blog
- Words are magic. Words are really magic. They add so much. You can take a TikTok video, and you think the TikTok video is the end in itself. You don’t need any gloss on that, but you absolutely do. It’s so much funnier if you can articulate what is embarrassing or weird or impressive about what that person is doing. That is a great hack.
from Looking Closely Is Everything by Craig Mod
- if any artist tells you, “I am a camera,” or “I am a mirror,” distrust them instantly, they’re fooling you, pulling a fast one. Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts—only in the truth. You get the facts from outside. The truth you get from inside.
from Ursula K. Le Guin on How to Become a Writer by Ursula K. Le Guin May 24
- But the essay as a literary form has long preceded the internet. So has the debate over the aesthetic metrics of a good essay. Merve Emre cites Virginia Woolf’s 1905 screed “The Decay of Essay Writing,” where Woolf bemoans the “amazing and unclothed egoism” of a new class of writers. “If one can set aside [Woolf’s] disdain, there is a larger point,... See more
from ౨ৎ Girl blog