Creative Writing Quotes

“In revision, as a rough rule, if the beginning can be cut, cut it. And if any passage sticks out in some way, leaves the main trajectory, could possibly come out — take it out and see what the story looks like that way. Often a cut that seemed sure to leave a terrible hole joins up without a seam. It’s as if the story, the work itself, has a shape it’s trying to achieve, and will take that shape if you’ll only clear away the verbiage.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“Forced to weigh your words, you find out which are the styrofoam and which are the heavy gold. Severe cutting intensifies your style, forcing you both to crowd and to leap.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“When editing begins it is on ‘large chunks’ – paragraphs or a series of related paragraphs perhaps – and their relationship to one another. She moves them around as a way of answering her structural questions. More specific editing processes are involved too, like those we saw in the example from Woolf’s work: deletion, insertion, and attention to repetition and abstraction”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“tropic heat oozed up from the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. Snow-clouds of elder-blossom banked in the sky, showering upon me the fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy suffocation. High”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me ... I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy. (Salinger, 1994 [1951],”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“Bildungsroman’ is a literary term taken directly from the German. It refers to a novel which charts the education and development of its hero or heroine as he or she comes to maturity. Famous examples include Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers [The Sorrows of Young Werther] (1774), Austen’s Emma (1816), and Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850). We have already noted the autobiographical nuances of Dickens’s novel, and critics have discerned autobiographical qualities in other Bildungsromans, so it may not come as a surprise that the term can provide a useful, general way of thinking about, or planning, the structure of a life writing narrative. The Bildungsroman is particularly closely related to a sub-genre of life writing: the conversion narrative, or spiritual account.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“all anybody is doing when engaging in life writing is giving a narrative shape to a story of a life.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“the beginning of David Copperfield, a novel by Charles Dickens. It may be fiction, but it raises issues crucial to the exploration of life writing and how it works. One of those issues concerns fact versus fiction, because how can anyone prove what they have only been told? Another is to do with the function of memory: incomplete memory doesn’t prevent Copperfield from writing about himself.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“creativity and imagination are as crucial to the life writing project as they are to fiction and poetry. We’ll explore, and attempt, both autobiography and biography in Part 4, and in activities you’ll be able to form your writing into poetry and/or prose.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“we still expect a biography to give an account of a person’s life, and times too.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“Pamphlets can consist of anything from around twelve to about thirty poems. They allow us to select and reject pieces, to space out main themes, to consider the dynamics of sub-sections or sequences, and to decide on opening and closing poems. Like individual poems, they require titles and possibly epigraphs, which makes us contemplate the most important impression we wish to give from this grouping of our work.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“The word stanza comes from the Italian for ‘room’: stanze (which is why I set that subject for the sonnet). Rooms are part of a larger structure, and this notion of the poem as house, as something habitable, is probably the most important lesson form teaches us.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“Slant Slant or half rhyme appears to be a phenomenon of the last hundred years or so. In fact it is a new definition for strategies poets have always used to build up musical patterns within and across lines. In Welsh poetry, for instance, where Wilfred Owen and Dylan Thomas encountered it, it’s called proest. It widens the focus from full rhyme to consider the range of assonantal or consonantal shapes our ear can recognise as more or less distant relations of the original rhyme sound. In so doing it broadens the range of English, allowing it to equal the rhyming resources of Italian or Russian by drawing on its native reserves of alliteration and vowel-patterning. It also reinforces the element of discovery which is an integral part of rhyme: the surprise of a good slant rhyme will invigorate the listener’s ear just as much as a too-easily anticipated full rhyme tires it.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“Leaving Inishmore’ by Michael Longley, from Selected Poems (1998, p.22). What”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“Poetry as an art form invites us to go beyond our preconceptions, to invent, to be truly imaginative. One reason for this is because that action, of going beyond ourselves, is an effect of the form itself: the poem is a structure which helps us to think differently, and one of the ways it does this is through its focus on imagery, encouraging us to think through our images in rational or irrational patterns.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“one of the hardest things a writer learns to do is actually to read their own work. From first draft to proofing, we tend to see what we intend to write, rather than what appears on the page. A clear signal that this is happening is the appearance of received phrases, what people dismissively call clichés. Many received phrases are in fact tired images, and many mixed metaphors appear simply because the writer has overlooked the way that two phrases have metaphoric content and so clash with each other. Attention to and elimination of the received phrase rejuvenates our writing at a basic level.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“Poetry is not always about self-expression in the sense that the ‘I’ who speaks in the poem is always the ‘I’ of the poet. Sometimes giving voice to others can be the most effective way we can find of expressing what we want to say. That other voice can be our polar opposite or a historical personage; it can be a character from someone else’s fiction or even an object. Some poets have found that finding and fully inhabiting these other voices becomes the driving principle of their poetry.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“Idiolect Each of us clearly has an idiolect, a particular way of speaking derived from our upbringing and education. Our parents’ and relatives’ speech patterns and vocal tics and mannerisms; the way people speak where we were born; the way people speak where we live now; what we’ve read and when we read it: all these feed in to the way we unconsciously select one expression over another, one rhythm or one word as opposed to another. Poetry enables us to become as conscious as possible about the nuances of language, indeed to manipulate those elements to an aesthetic end.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“Sometimes the discovery of something we can classify as our voice coincides with a weariness with that voice, and the struggle begins to create a new voice.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“construct a simple acrostic: take the letters of your first name, and run them down the left column of a page.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“Everyone has a way of speaking that’s unique, and the same is true of how we write. Writers unaware of this produce an unusual mixture of styles: their work contains some unconsidered phrases which feel almost anonymous; and other phrases filled with – equally unconsidered – personal quirkiness. The former are things anyone would say, and indeed no one would notice. The latter are things only they would say, which only they can’t hear. The search for a voice is often nothing more than bringing our attention to bear on how we already write, and filtering out that writing which conveys no individual charge. ACTIVITY 14.2”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions. It doesn’t bother me that the word ‘stone’ appears more than thirty times in my third book, or that ‘wind’ and ‘gray’ appear over and over in my poems to the disdain of some reviewers. If I didn’t use them that often I’d be lying about my feelings, and I consider that unforgivable. In fact, most poets write the same poem over and over. Wallace Stevens was honest enough not to try to hide it. Frost’s statement that he tried to make every poem as different as possible from the last one is a way of saying that he knew it couldn’t be.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“your job is to be honest and to try not to be too boring. However, if you must choose between being eclectic and various or being repetitious and boring, be repetitious and boring. Most good poets are, if read very long at one sitting.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“Whether a line forms a complete sentence or an incomplete one, whether it forms a musical phrase or strikes a harsh note, its purpose is clearly not limited to revealing sense. It is a unit of attention. The line momentarily removes a selection of words from the normal flow of language and suspends it for examination. You might compare this to the instant of consciousness – approximately three seconds long – which neuropsychologists believe constitutes the present moment. In that brief space we can appreciate the language contained in the line on a number of levels: its rhythm, its sound, its ideas, its phrase-making or its metaphoric content. We can even relate it to previous lines and anticipate its relationship with subsequent ones.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“What is a line holding if not metrical beats? It could hold an image; an unusual word or phrase; a tone; a rhythm, whether analysed or not. It could hold a bit of alliteration; it could hold all you can say in a single breath; it could have a rhyme at the end of it you want the reader to notice. Lines in poems, whether free verse or metrically precise, will contain one or more of these. When you try justifying to yourself why one unit is a line, and why another isn’t quite, ask yourself: ‘What is it holding?’ Is it holding enough to justify the reader looking on this for the whole three seconds of their present moment?”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“Herbert’s And now in age I bud again
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain
and relish versing.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“withholding it and disclosing it. The writer is always doing one or the other – either keeping things unknown or drip-feeding the reader with details.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“It’s a useful exercise to forbid yourself the use of keynote words such as ‘fury’ or ‘jealous’ when dramatizing an emotional condition.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings

“hunting down those moments that unintentionally tip the reader out of the dream.”
― Linda Anderson, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings