writing
Write. Write every day. Write whether you feel like writing or not. Choose a time of day. Perhaps you can get up an hour earlier, stay up an hour later, give up an hour of recreation, or even give up your lunch hour. If you can’t think of anything in your chosen genre, keep a journal. You should be keeping one anyway. Journal writing helps you to
... See moreOctavia E. Butler • Bloodchild
When I have to deal with something that disturbs me as much as the botfly did, I write about it.
Octavia E. Butler • Bloodchild
Ray Bradbury talks about the importance of not thinking when he is writing. He says that when he arrives at the typewriter, his task is to be living. To let his soul pour out onto the page. To quiet the mind and let his body do the talking. Then, he checks his work afterwards using the mind as a ‘corrective force’ to refine. But he uses the body to... See more
He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.
Stephen King • The Shining
When I could not think, I could not write nor could I socialize and carry on a conversation. I was the child again. The child who could not speak English.
Cathy Park Hong • Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
don’t worry about imagination. You have all the imagination you need, and all the reading, journal writing, and learning you will be doing will stimulate it. Play with your ideas. Have fun with them. Don’t worry about being silly or outrageous or wrong. So much of writing is fun. It’s first letting your interests and your imagination take you
... See moreOctavia E. Butler • Bloodchild
Specificity is the hallmark of good writing except when too much detail becomes lurid, gratuitous, and turns Cha, after years of dedicated labor by her critics and curators, back into “Oriental Jane Doe.”
Cathy Park Hong • Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
From a young age, I learned to speak for my mother as authoritatively as I could. Not only did I want to dispel the derision I saw behind that woman’s eyes, I wanted to shame her with my sobering fluency for thinking what she was thinking. I have been partly drawn to writing, I realize, to judge those who have unfairly judged my family; to prove
... See moreCathy Park Hong • Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
If you reveal anything, they collapse your art with your life—and I don’t want my autobiography hijacking my art. Maybe back then, my loss was a deep part of me but I have worked really hard to separate my work and my identity from that loss, and I will not be knocked back down.”