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Put another way, to write is human, to edit is divine.
Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.
I don’t know where the babysitter of the week was, either. I only know that I was in the bathroom, standing with my bare feet on the heater, watching to see if my brother would fall off the roof or make it back into the bathroom okay.
urging me to open wider until my jaws creaked,
said I could. “I want you to breathe deep,” he said. “When you wake up, you can have all the ice cream you want.”
Imitation preceded creation;
Some of this had to do with his intellect—Dave’s IQ tested in the 150s or 160s—but I think it was mostly his restless nature.
Olivia de Havilland put out James Caan’s eyes with makeshift knives in Lady in a Cage, saw Joseph Cotten come back from the dead in Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte,
worked. Our marriage has outlasted all of the world’s leaders except for Castro, and if we keep talking, arguing, making love, and dancing to the Ramones—gabba-gabba-hey—it’ll probably keep working. We came from different religions, but as a feminist Tabby has never been crazy about the Catholics, where the men make the rules (including the God-given directive to always go in bareback) and the women wash the underwear. And while I believe in God I have no use for organized religion. We came from similar working-class backgrounds, we both ate meat, we were both political Democrats with typical
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sexually compatible and monogamous by nature. Yet what ties us most strongly are the words, the language, and the work of our lives.
(actually I do, we had a chance to change the world and opted for the Home Shopping Network instead),
Baby Boomers
Augustine pursued both money and women. Following it he continued to struggle with his sexual impulses, and is known for the Libertine’s Prayer, which goes: “O Lord, make me chaste… but not yet.”
amoxicillin. THE PINK STUFF was expensive, and we were broke. I mean stony.
I would be paid sixty-four hundred dollars a year, which seemed an unthinkable sum after earning a dollar-sixty an hour at the laundry.
She would have broken through if given an extra hour or two in every day, but she was stuck with the usual twenty-four.
time, I think a lot of the heart would have gone out of me. Tabby never voiced a single doubt,
Pow! Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together,
Dodie and her brother Bill wore the same stuff every day for the first year and a half of high school: black pants and a short-sleeved checked sport shirt for him, a long black skirt, gray knee-socks,
five years of my drinking always ended with the same ritual: I’d pour any beers left in the refrigerator down the sink. If I didn’t, they’d talk to me as I lay in bed until I
Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful.
William Strunk
He hated the phrase “student body,”
“Personalize your stationery.”) He hated
phrases such as “the fact that” and “along these lines.”
phrases “at this point in time” and “at the end of the day” should be sent to bed without supper (or writing-paper,
The subject is just letting it happen. You should avoid the passive tense.
The Elements of Style.
Favorite
The adverb is not your friend.
They’re the ones that usually end in -ly. Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind.
I deny it. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs,
Writing is refined thinking. If your master’s thesis is no more organized than a high school essay titled “Why Shania Twain Turns Me On,”
The single-sentence paragraph more closely resembles talk than writing, and that’s good. Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.
Caribbean, leaving a trail of pulsing adverbs, wooden characters, and vile passive-voice constructions behind them.
Shakespeares, the Faulkners, the Yeatses, Shaws, and Eudora Weltys.
I’m afraid this idea is rejected by lots of critics and plenty of writing teachers, as well. Many of these are liberals in their politics but crustaceans in their chosen fields.
men and women who tell their classes that writing ability is fixed and immutable; once a hack, always a hack.
as a teenager. Some people never forget, that’s all, and a good deal of literary criticism serves only to reinforce a caste system which is as old as the intellectual snobbery which nurtured it.
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut. I’m a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, mostly fiction. I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read. It’s what I do at night, kicked back in my blue chair. Similarly, I don’t read fiction to study the art of fiction, but simply because I like stories. Yet there is a learning
One learns most clearly what not to do by reading bad prose—one novel like Asteroid Miners (or Valley of the Dolls, Flowers in the Attic, and The Bridges of Madison County, to name just a few)
It’s hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written, but I know it’s true.
Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
Mornings belong to whatever is new—the current
like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book—something
The biggest aid to regular (Trollopian?) production is working in a serene atmosphere.
the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all… as long as you tell the truth.
think you begin by interpreting “write what you know” as broadly and inclusively as possible.
the heart also knows things, and so does the imagination.
built with a love of the night and the unquiet coffin,
the assumption that the writer controls the material instead of the other way around.III
buyers want a good story to take
