writing
Imported tag from Readwise
writing
We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as Didio... See more
Jake Orthwein • Why Frame Problems? — Frame Problems
Narrative is a stratagem of mortality. It is a means, a way of living. It does not seek immortality; it does not seek to triumph over or escape from time (as lyric poetry does). It asserts, affirms, participates in directional time, time experienced, time as meaningful. If the human mind had a temporal spectrum, the nirvana of the physicist or the
... See moreUrsula K. Le Guin • Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
A writing journal is only a process by which one looks at life and a way with words and symbols, with the possibilities of image and story, or the unfolding of a sequence of rhythms and discoveries of feeling.
Phillip Lopate • Writers and Their Notebooks
The reader does not want to see us sweating it out. (Hemingway talked about the negative effect of “the smell of the midnight oil.”) And the reader is very attuned to this smell. The reader wants to us you being fun, reckless, open, confused.
But mostly, the reader wants your stories to be talking about something the two of you share. The reader may
... See moreClarke writes the way a magpie collects sparkly objects. Images and scenes arrive, unbidden, and Clarke writes down the fragments, and later pieces them together into a narrative, or several.
Alexandra Alter • Susanna Clarke Wrote a Hit Novel Set in a Magical Realm. Then She Disappeared. - The New York Times
I can feel jealous of David Sedaris’s fame, I can feel like I’ll never get to that point, but I should ask myself: am I doing 15 or 20 full rewrite drafts of my essays? Am I pushing myself to search for a universal feeling, for a moment of poignancy, and for a laugh, all in the same piece? Am I doing what he did, in my own way?
Summer Brennan • "How to Succeed on Substack"
Walk around with a pen and a scrap of paper. Write some meaty emails. Engage more intensely with this place.
James Somers • More People Should Write
Most people “write badly because they cannot think clearly,” observed H. L. Mencken.
Kenneth Roman • Writing That Works
Most people can't think clearly because they write badly
So perhaps our teaching (online and off) should be seen — and is generally taken — not as the passing of truths de haut en bas but as just one part of a fruitful or at least hopeful collaboration.