Marion Dane Bauer's Blog, page 15
November 28, 2017
The Way Story Lives in Us
There is no mystery greater than our own mystery. We are, to ourselves, unknown. And yet we do know. The thought we cannot quite think is nevertheless somehow a thought, and it lives in us without our being able to think it. We are a mystery, but we are a living mystery. The most alive […]
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November 21, 2017
A work in progress
In truth, I’ve found that any day’s routine interruptions and distractions don’t much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters. Steven King
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November 14, 2017
On Growing Older . . . Old
Why is “older” an acceptable word and “old” almost forbidden? To answer my own question, I suppose it’s because we’re all growing older, even the four-year-old next door. But old . . . at least in this youth-driven society, old smacks of incompetence, of irrelevance. Even worse, old smacks of that truly obscene-to-us word . […]
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November 7, 2017
There is no need to be afraid of death
There is no need to be afraid of death. It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we’re alive – to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a façade designed to conform to external definitions […]
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October 31, 2017
Knowing My Own Mind
There are times when I don’t know my own mind. Worse, there are times when I think I know my mind perfectly well and then find an entirely different mind on a later visit to my opinions. Which feels almost as though I have no mind at all. Some time ago one of my favorite […]
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October 24, 2017
Let the things that enter your life wake you up.
Let the things that enter your life wake you up. Life’s work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into your life wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that […]
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October 17, 2017
Where Does a Story Begin?
I’ve heard it said so many times that it has almost become trite. A story begins the moment the main character confronts profound change. I’ve also heard it said that writers tend to write their way into their stories. We often need to lop off our first ten, twenty, thirty pages when we find our […]
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October 10, 2017
I read because …
“I read because one life isn’t enough, and in the page of a book I can be anybody.” Richard Peck
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October 3, 2017
The Magic of LoonSong
LoonSong, 2017, a retreat for children’s and young-adult writers. We woke every morning to inspiration beside a lake, deep in a forest, in the wilderness of northern Minnesota. A place where Debby invited us into her dream. It was a time of multilayered, multifaceted writer talk. It was a time of long walks, of pontoon […]
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September 26, 2017
There is no mystery greater than our own mystery.
There is no mystery greater than our own mystery. We are, to ourselves, unknown. And yet we do know. The thought we cannot quite think is nevertheless somehow a thought, and it lives in us without our being able to think it. We are a mystery, but we are a living mystery. The most alive […]
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