30th June 2016 | for Creatives | writing, artists must EXPERIENCE, Ann Hood, Eudora Welty |
"Eudora Welty said something to the effect of: 'All a writer has to do is sit on her own front porch.' But I was thinking: 'I'll go run with the bulls; I'm going to dance in fountains."
"Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living—though you might not think so to look at most human beings—is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing."
"[The airplane pilot] said, 'Why do you think I do this job? It's for the seven minutes of takeoff and the 11 minutes of landing. The computer does the rest.' And to me, that's like writing. You do it because you get this great idea, and you have the excitement of the first draft, but most of it is revision, and doing the wrong stuff, and fixing and fixing. And then, you get the landing. It's very much the same."
"It's so easy to think about writing; so easy to talk about it; and it's so easy to avoid it. But a bit part of it is getting the writer to sit and do what they're supposed to do."
"What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence 'Write what you know,' ...It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know, we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one."
"I'm a big fan of telling young writers to take all the detours they possibly can, both in life and in writing. Those detours are going to lead you to where you need to be. If someone says, 'How would you like to spend two years working in the Czech Republic for the state department?,' you should do that. You can always get back to your novel. You need to have as many experiences as possible."
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