I saw this quoted in an essay I read this weekend and I had to hunt down the poem:
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’tyou can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write
W. S. Merwin,
from “Berryman“
This:
How you can be saying to someone, “You are the most important person in the world to me,” and yet be ignoring the small thing closest to his heart.
—Joy Castro,
quoting from her memoir, The Truth Book
“We think almost every product is better when you can experience it with the people you care about so over time we expect almost all of these products should naturally become social.” – Mark Zuckerberg
Whether or not you think almost every product — TVs, cars, pets, refrigerators, running shoes — is better when it’s “social,” will probably determine your gut feeling about Facebook’s long-term prospects.
I love bike shots when shot from behind. The sense of sailing through the city is easier to relate to when it’s not personalized with someone’s face.
If I shot this from the front I would feel like “Wow, that guy’s having fun.” When shot from the back I can more easily imagine myself in that position.
Pretty much every moment up until the completion of the first draft I am uncertain that there will be a finished book. But once I have a complete draft I know it’s going to happen. Even if it is radically rewritten. Even if I have to throw away large chunks. There will be a book.
I love this part. Because this is where I get in and get dirty. The real work of taking those words and turning them into an actual novel of goodness.
I have been writing about writers and their families so it is strange that the idea of rights versus responsibilities does not preoccupy me. I feel that I have only rights, and that my sole responsibility is to the reader, and is to make things work for someone I will never meet. I feel just fine about ignoring or bypassing the rights of people I have known and loved to be rendered faithfully, or to be left in peace, and out of novels. It is odd that the right these people have to be left alone, not transformed, seems so ludicrous.
…
The story has a shape, and that comes first, and then the story and its shape need substance and nourishment from the haunting past, clear memories or incidents suddenly remembered or invented, erased or enriched. Then the phrases and sentences begin, another day’s work. And if I am lucky, what comes into shape will, despite all the fragility and all the unease, seem more real and more true, be more affecting and enduring, than the news today, or the facts of the case, or the beams of Tuskar Rock Lighthouse as night falls and the real darkness comes.
When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing.
This is great. People who know what they are doing know the rules, and know what is possible and impossible. You do not. And you should not. The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. And you can.
If you don’t know it’s impossible it’s easier to do. And because nobody’s done it before, they haven’t made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.
What’s your advice to new writers?
Don’t give a shit. Don’t care. Books, until recently, were dangerous: banned, burned, watched. Write something dangerous. Say something you shouldn’t. Blow something up. But well.
[B]efore you can be good at something, you’ll almost certainly be bad to mediocre at it.
—Katie of Foxflat
in a guest post at Whip Up
But perhaps most damaging of all is our myth of the soul mate. We have certain expectations — nothing short of total emotional support from our spouses. We also require rocking sex, a perfect other half of the parenting team, and our go-to playmate. We expect to share everything in our lives with just this one person, and then we wonder where all the magic went. There’s no magic if there’s no mystery, and there’s no mystery if you are sharing space with your significant other every moment of every day. Add to that the instant buffet line of possible replacements that you can find on any dating website, and it’s no wonder people are finding it difficult to commit.
The Remainder Table 