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Nik | XXXII | Writing Blog | Out here with lanterns, lookin' for bullshit. | I follow w/ my main (@trysteroo)

[viktor-sbor]

The original manuscript of George Orwell's "1984", 1948.

[intheepines]

Spending my entire long weekend editing this monstrosity (halfway there!), but I think after this round I might send it out to get feedback... Anyone work with beta readers or dev editors or other impartial people who will read a long thing and say whether it's garbage or not?

[intheepines]

100,000 words and it's still not a "full draft" but I'm So Damn Close. Cutting this down is going to be very difficult, but at least there's a sequel that I've already written half of and some stuff might be able to be repurposed there. Keep being tempted to work on the sequel without giving this one a proper ending. (I hate writing endings)

[intheepines]

The thing is happening again where I write something into a scene and then it happens in real life. Yesterday morning I wrote that one character gave another a hard candy that had been in his pocket and was kind of melted with the paper stuck to it. And yesterday afternoon at work my coworker gave me a hard candy that had been in his pocket that I had to spend five minutes trying to pick the paper off because it had gotten all melted. (He has never done this before) Weird stuff...

[tinyghosts]

“I was working full-time in an office environment and had to get crafty about when and where to write and there were no long periods for me to, as you put it, “think deeply or chase often fleeting intuitions” – although, there among all of the mad activity and the non-writing, there was deep thought, some of the deepest I’d ever done, because I was struggling actively with paucity and overwork, and when I sat down to write, I’d say, I was more likely to follow those “fleeting intuitions.” It felt like one hour of writing in this new, awakened mode was worth ten hours of writing in the old mode. And having to fight for that time made me focus – it was no longer possible to go off and engage in long bouts of research. I had to make the time count, right then and there, which, in turn, helped me find out what I really believed in, in prose.”

— George Saunders (via misserinmarie)

[artemisiasea]

From Practicing Mediocrity

[afrohijab]

“The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it…If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write. I’m an old-fashioned writer and, despite the odds, I want to change the world”

— James Baldwin

[noentiendotiendo]

“By comparing two seemingly unrelated objects—a restaurant bar and a cave, a mirror and a mirage— we are sometimes able to see an old thing in a new and vivid way.”

— On Writing, Stephen King.

[yesterdaysprint]

Punch, England, September 5, 1934

[tendermimi]

“I suppose life, I suppose the world, is a nightmare, but I can’t escape from it and am still dreaming it and I cannot reach salvation. Yet, I do my best and I find salvation to be the act of writing, of going in for writing in a rather hopeless way…My fate is to think of all things, of all experiences, as having been given me for the purpose of making beauty out of them. I know that I have failed, I’ll keep on failing, but still that is the only justification for my life.”

— Jorge Luis Borges on Gnosticism

[intheepines]

"The world around me is dissolving, leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away...I am thinking that when the great silence descends upon all and everything music will at last triumph. When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written."

-- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

[molecularhomosexual]

There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you’re even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and so on.

Or there’s the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is “Does it work, and how does it work?” How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through, you try another book. This second way of reading’s intensive: something comes through or it doesn’t. There’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret.

Gilles Deleuze, “Letter to a Harsh Critic”

[koldbrew]

“No one else is gonna write your story the way you would” is honestly some of the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten. It’s really motivating!

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“In order to be free you simply have to be so, without asking permission of anybody. You have to have your own hypothesis about what you are called to do, and follow it, not giving in to circumstances or complying with them. But that sort of freedom demands powerful inner resources, a high degree of self-awareness, a consciousness of your responsibility to yourself and therefore to other people.”

Andrei Tarkovsky, from “The artist’s responsibility,” Sculpting in Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (University of Texas Press, 1987)

[antigonick]

“And the truth of a poem is, of course, something that goes far beyond paraphrasable propositional content: truth in poetry would seem to be propositional content made available as direct experience, amplified into directly felt insight.”

— Barbara Folkart, Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation

[apocryphics]

mary ruefle

[syrejaden]

from James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work:

“A story is impelled by the necessity to reveal: the aim of the story is revelation, which means that a story can have nothing—at least not deliberately—to hide. This also means that a story resolves nothing. The resolution of a story must occur in us, with what we make of the questions with which the story leaves us. A plot, on the other hand, must come to a resolution, prove a point: a plot must answer all the questions which it pretends to pose.”