omwow

Wannabe writer. Curious creature. Creative fool.

[omwow]

[omwow]

[omwow]

[omwow]

[omwow]

[omwow]

[omwow]

It’s often said that writers have only one or two themes they consistently return to, finding new ways of addressing them, new fictional situations in which they can be explored. My theme, I have no doubt, is giving up. That’s what’s kept me going.

— Geoff Dyer, The Last Days of Roger Federer

[omwow]

[omwow]

How to break creative blocks and get into flowwwww

[slfcare]

good things to pay attention to more often

the color of trees

clouds and how they look different throughout the day

the different colors the mornings can have. sometimes it's an orange hue and sometimes pink and sometimes it's too misty to tell

pretty color schemes in random places (the trees and your neighbors wooden patio and the color of their car)

the states of the vehicles passing you by, dents and scratches and the different trinkets suspended from their rearview mirrors

the sound of silence

the shadows the lights cast in your home, like how sunset looks different than sunrise, and the shadows the sun casts look different than those of your lamps and candles

pretty details in buildings and houses like certain types of windows or doorknobs or archways

the movement of things in the wind. flags, leaves, flowers, people's hair and coats

[omwow]

My FAVORITE WRITING EXERCISE (it's simple af)

Pick one of your favorite passages from one of your favorite books. Read it. And then rewrite it; try to make it better than the original.

Compare both versions. What can you learn from the original? What can you learn from your version? What worked? What didn’t?

[omwow]

Magnificent emanation. Mountain sunrise. I've been to a place that resonated with something in my heart, and this is my attempt to share that resonance through creative expression.

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

I’ve seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism going around, but to really appreciate it you have to know the context.

The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech. She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.

Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead in the eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”

She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit. She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable”. She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees. And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

Ursula K LeGuin got up in front of an audience of some of the most powerful people in publishing, was expected to give a trite and politically safe argument about literature, and instead told them directly “Your empire will fall. And I will help it along.”

[woolandcoffee]

We stan an icon.

[atlinmerrick]

I never knew the whole quote or its circumstances. Lord she was amazing.

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” – Ursula K LeGuin

[einarshadow]

@deadcatwithaflamethrower

[dduane]

That right up there is the essential style of the woman who radicalized me. :) It was a privilege to share the planet with her, though (to my great regret) we never met.

[neil-gaiman]

I wasn’t surprised. She’d sent me an email the week before, where she said

Dear Neil

Heroism isn’t exactly my thing, so please just look at me as your fellow writer, OK? Two grunts in the great war of Art against Insentience, or something.

Anyhow, yes, I did have a question:

I’m told I have 3 to 5 minutes to say thanks. Having sat through 5-minute thankyou speeches that seemed to last 3 hours, I thought I’d enliven the gratitude with some very brief remarks about (for one thing) the big publishers’ practice of grossly overcharging public libraries for ebooks, limiting access, etc. I know you’re a true library lion. So I wanted to check if you’d welcome this, & if so we could maybe kind of strike the same note – or at least tell you, so that if I do say some things that our publishers will perceive as ungrateful, subversive, unladylike, etc., it won’t take you by surprise.

very best wishes

Ursula

(And because I suppose some people might want to know what I replied, I said,

Dear Ursula,

I’m very happy to be a fellow grunt in the war.

I think that anything you want to say is going to be good, because you mean it. I don’t think chiding publishers etc is out of place from a public platform - it may even change things - and the world of five (or is it four?) monstrous huge international publishers us not the one either of us grew up with. (I’m with one giant in the UK, another in the US, in each case because they engulfed and devoured my original publisher.)

And we neither of us got where we are, or indeed, anywhere, by toeing any party line.

Love

Neil)

[omwow]

Tumblr as a creative journal?

I really like the idea of having tumblr as a sort of creative journal. This tumblr thing is a quirky little corner of the internet that seems to somehow play by different rules.

I remember thinking that the Yahoo acquisition would be a death sentence, and in a way it maybe was. Compared to it’s former billion dollar evaluation, it’s now a fragment of what it could have been. But it somehow managed to be this creative playground for weirdos on the internet, even more so than Reddit it seems to me. I want to play with it more in the coming weeks and months, even though I can’t quite say why. It’s just a feeling, a curiosity that I have around what this could be and how it can be used as a creative journal.

I’m also curious to learn more about the people who use tumblr in different ways, what makes the community tick, what gets people here interested or not. Definitely not long, rambling posts like this one, but hey, this is for myself mostly, just jotting down some thoughts.

[neil-gaiman]

Why do you use tumbrl as your main social media? Is not a bit outdated and filled with weird ppl?

Very much so! It's definitely outdated and filled with weird people. But I'm afraid it has some downsides as well.

[omwow]

Gotta love this answer

[omwow]

Want to build a writing habit, but struggling to do it consistently? I've got 18 strategies for you (all you really need is 1 that works for you—and one of them will!). Check out my post and leave a comment if you want help with this: https://omwow.com/writing-habit/

[metamorphesque]

― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart