Authenticity
What does it mean for something to be 'authentic'?
Keely Adler and
Authenticity
learning how to write was very much like learning how to live: it all begins by listening to your inner voice and honoring it.
Living is as much a craft as is writing. There are rules and frameworks one can follow, but ultimately, one must define and cultivate one’s own style.
Living is as much a craft as is writing. There are rules and frameworks one can follow, but ultimately, one must define and cultivate one’s own style.
Ashley Zhang • Surrender control over your stories
Donald Glover in an interview with The New Yorker: “Authenticity is the journey of figuring out who you are through what you make.”
Voice isn’t only about what you sound like and what you say; it’s also about how you deliver it. As Rebecca Solnit describes it, a writer’s voice is “something of the personality and the principles of the writer, where your humor and seriousness are located, what you believe in, why you write, who and what you write about, and who you write for.”
Cortney Cassidy • A soft manifesto
Honesty is a strange aesthetic criterion to prioritize. Great confessional art was never about accurately representing reality, but about giving voice to the process of experiencing it—how we feel, not what we’re feeling, making lucid that which usually eludes full expression.
Dirt • Dirt: The Decay of Lying...
Always stick to what makes you weird, odd, strange, different. That’s your source of power.
Robert Greenetwitter.comWhat I want to say most is that I am not an improved or better version of myself than I was a year ago because that is no longer a goal — but I am a truer version, a closer-in version, a more expansive and open version, a less clinging-to-certainty version, and that, to me, counts for a lot more than seeking to endlessly upgrade myself.
the goal is not to optimize yourself, it’s to get closer to yourself
Swept up in the Instagramization of the 2010s, the contemporary poetry world saw an exaltation of ‘honesty’ as an aesthetic priority. Poetry not as craft, but as ‘outlet,’ with the goal not of developing ourselves and enriching our understanding of the world, but of sitting more comfortably with how we already were and what we already believed.
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