updated 2mo ago
Release the Bats: Writing Your Way Out Of It
I heard of an exercise used in a writing workshop that involved imagining a photograph so personal that we couldn’t show it to anyone. What would it be? That’s the level of exposure we’re aiming for.
from Release the Bats: Writing Your Way Out Of It by DBC Pierre
Robin Harford added 4mo ago
I learned that I was fucking weird. That humans are fucking weird and that we inhabit houses-of-cards made of bent ideas. That anyone with confidence is dangerously deluded; that anyone without it is fucking doomed.
from Release the Bats: Writing Your Way Out Of It by DBC Pierre
Literature is about people and their truths, which means conflict because our truths are rarely the same.
from Release the Bats: Writing Your Way Out Of It by DBC Pierre
I can also now honestly say that the practical secrets to a page-turning book would easily fit onto a napkin.
from Release the Bats: Writing Your Way Out Of It by DBC Pierre
Maniacs are in good company.
from Release the Bats: Writing Your Way Out Of It by DBC Pierre
Every strong feeling is rocket fuel, a clean multipurpose fuel, not to be spat raw onto a page but to drive us to sit there and scheme and craft and confess.
from Release the Bats: Writing Your Way Out Of It by DBC Pierre
The reason to make a big deal out of licence is this: we have to dismantle the censors in our heads. There’s a sense in which that means dismantling our selves. A bank clerk doesn’t have to do it, nobody really has to but us. One reason we’re held back in writing is the restraints which have been installed as part of our civilisation and preparatio
... See morefrom Release the Bats: Writing Your Way Out Of It by DBC Pierre
The state we’re trying to achieve is one of having nothing to lose. Having nothing to lose is a powerful position – the most powerful.
from Release the Bats: Writing Your Way Out Of It by DBC Pierre
In having written down a story, any story where something happens, we have the opening to something much bigger. And a beautiful mystery of the writing process is that whatever that first story is, you will end up writing what you have to write as a result of it.
from Release the Bats: Writing Your Way Out Of It by DBC Pierre
Writing of something you’ve done yourself is all you need to add life to a book, and that breath can fly into new stories.
from Release the Bats: Writing Your Way Out Of It by DBC Pierre