apothegms

[truepenny]

This is matociquala's fault, as so many things are. She's listed off writing advice (and the first time I typed that, it lost its prefix, which ended up looking oddly appropriate) which becomes more Zen the longer you look at it.

Which has inspired/provoked me into making a collection of my own, of the things I try to keep in mind about my writing--and about my life, for that matter, since the two are largely contiguous. You'll notice that some of these are not talking about writing, but about love. I think there's not much difference between love and creativity; both insist that you make yourself vulnerable, and both can leave you feeling like you've walked into a coil of barbed wire.

The first two of these are via matociquala her own self. The others are things that had previously lodged in my brain.


"You must do the thing you think you cannot do."
--Eleanor Roosevelt.

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional."
--Kathleen Casey Thiesen.

"... there isn't any safe and painless way to love. You have to stand and deliver, as the highway robbers say."
--Laurie Colwin

"I told her ... that maybe all her loneliness and paranoia would turn out to be great material. She said she wasn't paranoid. She just worried that all her friends got together in small groups and talked meanly about her."
--Anne Lamott

"Love is patient, love is kind, but let's be honest / Love is a catalogue of deadly sins."
--Jeffrey Foucault

"Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead."
--Gene Fowler

MILLIE: Sometimes it seems like grownups are trying to tell me that being good is no substitute for being bad with style.
--David Craig Simpson, Ozy and Millie

"When I look down, I miss all the good stuff. And when I look up, I just trip over things."
--Ani DiFranco

"I think all potters dream of making teapots that don't dribble, except those who are afflicted with nightmares and dream of endlessly making ones that do."
--jonsinger

"If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn't hesitate to do so."
--Andre Gide

"It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
--E. L. Doctorow

"It was a bit like wrestling a bear. Some days I was on top. Most days, the bear was on top."
--Neil Gaiman

GINGER: What the fuck, B, this is your idea. If you don't like your ideas, stop having them.
--Ginger Snaps

"You can play with your Magneto figure and your Gandalf figure, and they can fight each other. Or you can have them love each other."
--Sir Ian McKellen