Novelist

[thequotejournals]

It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness.

Chuck Palahniuk, from Diary (2003)

[poetsandwriters]

With any work of art, in the beginning you’re fighting for attention, begging for a chance. The first order of business is to earn the next minute they’re going to give you, and then the next and the next. Your first obligation is not to explain everything you’re going to interest them in but rather to get them interested.

Susan Orlean, one of the featured presenters in this weekend’s Poets & Writers Live—San Francisco: Inspiration (via poetsandwriters)

[lauramcneal]

The road to Grassina

[lauramcneal]

[poetsandwriters]

“How do you hold people’s attention? This is the central question for any novelist, and there are as many answers as there are readers. Some people will say to focus on writing beautiful sentences. Others love a surprising plot. Still others say that deep characterization is the key. I think the only answer you can really give is to try not to waste people’s time.”

—Hannah Gersen, “Writing for Strangers” in the Sept/Oct Poets & Writers Magazine (2016)

[birdwings]

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (via poetsandwriters)

[lauramcneal]

Wooden Swing, Cottonwood School, Emporia, Kansas

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Fishermen with nets, Sharjah, UAE

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Public Chalkboard near Chalk Farm Road, Camdentown, on the Regents Canal path

[nationalbook]

Meet the Judges for the 2016 National Book Awards

Fiction: James English (Chair), Karen Joy Fowler, T. Geronimo Johnson, Julie Otsuka & Jesmyn Ward

Nonfiction: Cynthia Barnett, Masha Gessen, Greg Grandin, Melissa Harris-Perry (Chair) & Ronald Rosbottom

Poetry: Mark Bibbins, Jericho Brown, Katie Ford, Joy Harjo (Chair) & Tree Swenson

Young People’s Literature: Will Alexander, Valerie Lewis, Ellen Oh, Katherine Paterson (Chair) & Laura Ruby

[lauramcneal]

Closed for the Winter.  Employee Recreation Gym at Yellowstone National Park.

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Gingerbread Eiffel Tower designed by my nephew, Jackson Rhoton. 

[lauramcneal]

Thatched roof cottage and the Hardy Tree, our Christmas Eve gingerbread homage to England.  The grave stones arranged in 1865 by the young Thomas Hardy around the base of an ash tree in the St. Pancras churchyard are represented here by Nutter Butters.  Of course.

[poetsandwriters]

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. [It] will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.

Octavia Butler  (via poetsandwriters)

[vintageanchorbooks]

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.

James Baldwin (via vintageanchorbooks)

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Near the New York Public Library.

[vintageanchorbooks]

A story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And ‘making sense’ must be here understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one’s felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (via vintageanchorbooks)