Category Archives: Quotes

Photography feels like outward movement

When you’re floundering in grief, photography can get you out of the house, while writing is a key for a different door. I find I do my most coherent writing at home, and create my best photographs when I’m outside. Photography feels like outward movement, reaching out into the world, my eyes open, creating new images. Writing, on the other hand, is an inward retreat, as I sink into myself to find the words, dropping into my body and swimming with the currents of my past, locating memories that hold clues to today.

—Susannah Conway
excerpt from This I Know: Notes on Unraveling the Heart
@ Poppytalk

The Real Fear isn’t Rejection

There are some great quotes in this Ray Bradbury profile:

The time we have alone, the time we have in walking, the time we have in riding a bicycle, is the most important time for a writer. Escaping from the typewriter is part of the creative process. You have to give a subconscious time to think. Real thinking always occurs on the subconscious level.

Note to self: go for a run.

If there were three of me, I could keep us all busy. Painting fulfills a need to be non-intellectual. There are times when we have to get our brains out in our fingers. After a good day of writing, I feel like I’ve been for a long hike in another world and painting helps me relax.

Don’t you just love “we have to get our brains out in our fingers”?

I worry about rejection, but not too much. The real fear isn’t rejection, but that there won’t be enough time in your life to write all the stories you have in you. So every time I put a new one in the mail, I know I’ve beaten death again.

This is going in my FEAR! article.

It’s quite wonderful to see writing treated as a legitimate occupation, not a “tedious delusion” (TM Marge Piercy), though it may make you long for the days when a writer’s work was done when s/he put the story in the (snail) mail.  lol.

Do good, feel good

[Y]ou don’t get healthy self-esteem from constantly telling yourself how great you are, or even from other people telling you how great you are. You get healthy self-esteem from behaving in ways that you yourself find estimable.

For instance, you feel better about yourself when you keep a difficult resolution, meet a challenge, solve a problem, learn a skill, or cross something unpleasant off your to-do list. And one of the best ways to feel better about yourself is to help someone else. Do good, feel good.

I had a friend who went through a period of tremendous rejection: she was fired from her job, she didn’t get into the graduate program to which she’d applied, and her boyfriend broke up with her. Everything worked out fine, and I asked her how she got through such a tough time. She said, “I was practically addicted to doing good deeds for other people. It was the only way I could make myself feel like I wasn’t a total loser.”

—Gretchen Rubin

A symbiotic relationship

Taking care of the reader isn’t merely a matter of dispensing appropriate facts as necessary. It’s a commitment on a writer’s part to maintain the reader/writer relationship, and to honor the fact that readers co-create the work with their own voices and imaginations. Our works reach fruition through a symbiotic relationship with readers that we must attend to and maintain. If we offer them only a murky, imprecise experience, have we really held up our end of the bargain as writers?

—Steven Wingate

9 Writing Tips

1. Write every day.
2. Even fifteen minutes is long enough to write.
3. Remember that good ideas often come during the revision stage.
4. Don’t binge-write.
5. Keep a commonplace book, inspiration board, scrapbook, or catch-all box to keep track of ideas and images.
6. Consider physical comfort.
7. Down with boredom.
8. Stuck? Go for a walk and read a good book.
9. Have something to say!

—Gretchen Rubin

Different

[W]e need to make a distinction between living alone and being alone, or being isolated, or feeling lonely. These are all different things.

—Eric Klinenberg

Mostly I’m glad for [Daniel] Orozco’s damn good example – of taking your time. Of doing what you do, as very best as you can do it, and shutting out the noise of what everyone else is doing. Of focusing on quality not quantity, which seems an apt, if cliché, mantra for someone who set most of his stories in uninspiring workplace settings. Orozco’s cumulative oeuvre to date, and how it came to be, is itself a resonant narrative, the 10th story of the collection you might say. It speaks to the reader about foraging for a truthful place, a perch of realness, in the midst of and despite the specter of loneliness.

—Sonya Chung

In which The Globe and Mail notices slow writing…

First there was fast food, then came slow food, followed quickly (!) by every imaginable iteration of the theme: slow cities, slow travel, slow schools, even slow cycling. So it was only a matter of time before slow writing seeped upon the scene.

It happened inconspicuously earlier this month…

—John Barber

insert record screech here

Ahem.