Category Archives: Quotes

Write it all

[N]ever censor yourself while you are still writing the story. Save the censoring for the final draft.

Here’s why.

Self-censorship isn’t an exact science. While you’re making sure not to write anything that will offend your parents, you may also be holding back some important emotional truth that will make your story rich and insightful. Don’t block the creative flow. Write it all. Every detail that occurs to you. Until it’s published, it’s private, so be honest, frank, and free.

—Tayari Jones

Scrupulous

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

—George Orwell
in “Politics and the English Language“

Everyday Feminism

[T]oo many people, and to my dismay, too many young people, see feminism as more a label than a praxis. When I’m teaching Race, Racism and the Law and I talk about the intersection of race, gender and sexual orientation, when we talk about what would be mainstream feminist thought, many students would agree with those ideas , ideals and ideology more broadly. But if you call them feminists, many of them get upset, because they see it as this static label, and they’re not even sure what it means, but a lot of them think it’s bad, even people who would otherwise embrace feminist principles. So that’s probably the biggest challenge: Getting people to understand that there is such a thing as everyday feminism, and that’s what thoughtful people practice. Many of us do feminism all the time, and we should be comfortable acknowledging that. If I asked a class of people “are you a feminist?” half the people would say “no.” But if I said, “do you believe the following things or do the following things?” then I’d see very different results. I mean, if you love and respect and value women, you’re a feminist.

—Lolita Buckner Inniss

All In

[A]lmost seven years after I landed in Shanghai, my novel has just been published. I know I’m supposed to celebrate, but the truth is that in letting go of it, I feel lost, even more lost than I felt in those first days in Shanghai. My primary consolation is that I’ve started writing a new novel. I’m still learning my way around, still learning the people who live there, but I’m all in. That, I’ve come to see, is the only way to write. Each story is where we live, unconditionally, as if for good—even knowing that, eventually, we’ll pack up and start again.

—Deanna Fei

The empathy you are going to need

Writers are often motivated by something/someone that angers, irritates, or appalls them. Some people write to get even with a person who has hurt them, or to expose some sort of destructive force in their community. … If your story is going to be any good, you are going to have to get past this.

…

One thing I like to do is to write journal entries in the voices of other people, or even characters in my books. I sometimes do it for people who have hurt me deeply, so I can kind of get a grip on their behavior. The challenge is that you have to discover something new about the person or character. If your exercise reveals only what you came to the page with in the first place, then you have not tapped into the empathy you are going to need to write the story you want to write. The thing is that you are really going to have to want to understand that person, which means you may have to let go of that anger.

—Tayari Jones

You don’t really sound smart

The message: You have to write the same way as others in your field. You must use multisyllabic words, complex phrasing, and sentences that go on for days, because that’s how you show you’re smart. If you’re too clear, if your sentences are too simple, your peers won’t take you seriously.

Many people—publishers of scholarly work, editors at higher-education publications, agents looking for academic authors capable of writing trade books—who think about the general quality of scholarly prose would admit that we’re in a sorry state, and most would say there isn’t much to do about it.

…

By writing prose that is nearly unintelligible not just to the general public, but also to graduate students and fellow academics in your discipline, you are not doing the work of advancing knowledge. And, honestly, you don’t really sound smart. I understand that there are ideas that are so difficult that their expression must be complex and dense. But I can tell you, after years of rejecting manuscripts submitted to university presses, most people’s ideas aren’t that brilliant.

—Rachel Toor

The best editors edit because they want to

To encourage writers to write about big issues is all well and good, but writers in an open society are going to do that regardless. The best writers write because they have to, but the best editors edit because they want to. It’s the editors, not the writers, who need encouraging.

—Jay Baron Nicorvo

True enough. Still… if anyone wants to leave their estate to Toasted Cheese (a la Poetry), please do get in touch.

(P.S. Why is the Poetry Foundation still soliciting donations? They have two. hundred. million. dollars. If you are able to donate to an arts organization, please choose one that’s less well off!)

Reverse the oldest cliché

[H]idden in an article on how “Salt” is oh-so-empowering for female action heroes is this tidbit. The filmmakers believe that it was perfectly OK for the spouse to be rescued from mortal danger if said love interest was a girl, but not if the romantic partner was a man. Apparently, it’s great if the action hero is a girl, as long as she doesn’t have the opportunity to one-up any male counterparts or reverse the oldest cliché in the action-film handbook. Saying that girls can be portrayed as helpless damsels in distress but boys can’t or shouldn’t be is the very opposite of the sort of “progress” that Noyce and Jolie claim to be making.

—Scott Mendelson

This is so, so tiresome. The most insidious part, I think, is that it’s not just supposedly “weak” female characters that need rescuing. Rather, it seems like a rule in film & television that any female character who is depicted as strong or tough (police, military, action hero! etc.) must at some point be saved! by a man! I guess this serves to placate the male viewing audience, allowing them to think: “yeah, she’s tough—for a chick—but I could take her on (or save her!)” Barf.

See also: Woman must die! to give Man motivation to save the world. Hey! Here’s an idea! Why not kill off the man for a change? That would be a twist no one would be expecting. It’d be like that old surgeon joke. Except in this version, the audience would be looking at Woman kneeling sadly over Man’s body and be all like, “So when’s he going to wake up from his dream?”