The Writing Den

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Creativity does not live in a cave inside your head. That shit’s gotta come out and play. It has to splash in rain puddles. It has to climb trees. It has to build a ground-to-air star-exploding laser out of Duplo blocks and a repurposed iPhone. You need to give yourself the time every day to do the thing that you want to do. Our days and nights get crowded as life bloats and swells to fill the spaces, so you have to — have to — push all that aside with a barbaric yawp and give yourself the time to be creative.This is both in the day-to-day and in the “scope of your entire life” sense — in the day to day, you need time with your creativity. And in the long term, your creativity needs that time to get bigger, get weirder, get more awesome. Plants need water. Alpacas need food. Creativity needs time. We’re all dying. Fuck stagnation. High-five creation.

Chuck Wendig (via writingquotes)

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Fran Lebowitz on Why She Writes (Paris Review)

INTERVIEWER

This all sounds so difficult. Why do you do it? What does it give back?

LEBOWITZ

The rewards of any warrior. The word that best describes my feeling of having written is triumphant—triumphant on the level of Alexander the Great. Having overcome your worst fear, the thing you are most vulnerable to, that is the definition of heroic.

Also, it’s such a worthwhile human activity. The most.

Finally, no soldier ever came to me and said, You have to be a writer, but it was decided long ago that it was a given. So when I’m writing it’s the only time I feel all right. It’s the only time I feel justified. Whenever I am doing anything else, which is most of the time, even if it is not something like robbing a bank, I feel felonious. Writing is what I’m supposed to be doing. 

You can read the entire interview here:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1931/a-humorist-at-work-fran-lebowitz

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Avoid using cliches in your writing.

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This!

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To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.

Aldous Huxley (via writingquotes)

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Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement. The ordinary world of work is closed to him — and that if he’s lucky!

Peter Straub (via writingquotes)

Truth.

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You don’t actually have to write anything until you’ve thought it out. This is an enormous relief, and you can sit there searching for the point at which the story becomes a toboggan and starts to slide.

Marie de Nervaud (via writingquotes)

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The Shapes of Stories, a Kurt Vonnegut Infographic on Narrative Structure

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Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things that people do.

William Zinsser (via writingquotes)

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Sad news from the comedy world as yesterday we learned of the passing of the legendary comedic writer, director, and actor Harold Ramis. He is a man largely responsible for some of the biggest and most memorable film comedies of all-time that include National Lampoon’s Animal House, Caddyshack, Stripes, National Lampoon’s Vacation and Groundhog Day. Of course most of us will forever remember him in the role of Dr. Egon Spengler (a man whose hobbies included collecting “molds, spores and fungus”) in the iconic 1984 film Ghostbusters. Ramis of course was no stranger to the NYPL as you can see in the photo above from the day of the Ghostbusters film shoot at the Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at 42nd Street. To purposely (mis)quote Dr. Peter Venkman at the end of Ghostbusters: “See you on the other side Mr. Ramis.”  You will be missed. 

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To be a creative, innovative horror writer, you must read a lot of everything, and a lot of that everything must be horror. You may be thinking, ‘How can I be creative and original with all those other authors’ ideas floating around in my head?’ But this is critical: The sheer amount of material floating around in your head will prevent you from copying any one author. Instead you will find a tiny piece of character from this book, a tiny piece of plot from that book, a certain stylistic technique from that other, which you will combine into something totally new. It is the writer who reads only Stephen King who will turn out stories that sound like Stephen King – on a very, very bad day.

Jeanne Cavelos (via writingquotes)

Great rebuttal to the argument that you should read while you write for fear of being influenced! 

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Happy 83th Birthday to Nobel prize-winning author, Toni Morrison!

In celebration, stop by one of our NYPL branches to grab any of Morrison’s books, which include Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Song of Solomon. 

Also, watch this LIVE from NYPL video, where Morrison discusses races and writing with author, Junot Diaz.

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I’m up to my ears in unwritten words.

J.D. Salinger, excerpt from a letter to Jean Miller  (via braceletofnoor)

Me too.

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Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.

Stephen King (via writingquotes)

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Valentine's Day: 10 quotes about love from great authors

From the good to the bad and from the humorous to the sublime, 10 authors express their thoughts about romance.

Happy Valentine's Day, Everyone!