Becoming a Writer
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Read between November 26, 2022 - February 1, 2023
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your writing self is an instinctive, emotional creature, and if you are not careful you will find yourself living the life that will give you the least annoyance and the greatest ease instead of a life that will continually feed and stimulate your talent.
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If you leave it to the more sensitive side of your nature to set the conditions of work and living for you, you may find yourself at the end of your days with very little to show for the gift you were born with.
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Writing calls on unused muscles and involves solitude and immobility.
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a journalist’s career does teach two lessons which every writer needs to learn—that it is possible to write for long periods without fatigue, and that if one pushes on past the first weariness one finds a reservoir of unsuspected energy—one reaches the famous “second wind.”
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But it is possible to make either typing or writing by hand second nature, so that muscular strain will not slow you down or keep you from writing. So if you are to have the full benefit of the richness of the unconscious you must learn to write easily and smoothly when the unconscious is in the ascendant.
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However halting or perfunctory the writing is, write. If you must, you can write, “I am finding this exercise remarkably difficult,” and say what you think are the reasons for the difficulty. Every the complaint from day to day till it no longer represents the true state of affairs.
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These two strange and arbitrary performances—early morning writing, and writing by prearrangement—should be kept up till you write fluently at will.
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the only way to read as a writer is to go over everything twice.
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Again it may be that you feel that your writing is monotonous, that verb follows noun, and adverb follows verb, with a deadly sameness throughout your pages. You are struck by the variety, the pleasant diversity of sentence structures and rhythms in the author you are reading. Here is the real method of playing the sedulous ape: The first sentence has twelve words; you will write a twelve word sentence. It begins with two words of one syllable each, the third is a noun of two syllables, the fourth is an adjective of four syllables, the fifth an adjective of three, etc. Write one with words of ...more
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The truth is that we all have a tendency to remember things which we saw under the clear, warm light of childhood, and to return to them whenever we wish to bring a scene to life.
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If you find yourself groping for a theme you may take this as a fair piece of advice, simple as it sounds: “You can write about anything which has been vivid enough to cause you to comment upon it.” If a situation has caught your attention to that extent, it has meaning for you, and if you can find what that meaning is, you have the basis for a story.
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Every piece of writing which is not simply the purveying of straightforward information—as a recipe or a formula is, for example—is an essay in persuasion.