writing-process

Writingis therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, andwriting some more can help you control issues that you face.

Then I started to think in Lipp__ about when I had first been able to write a story about losing everything. It was up in Cortina d__mpezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called __ut of Season_ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

Don__ have the veins bulging in your biro.

...I make no apology about stirring the depths - every human longs to swim under water and see what lurks beneath ...

Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.

The trouble is, writing the damn thing is like unscrewing your skull and pouring the contents of your brain into an empty tank. The tank has a shape, more or less - has more or less defined edges, a bottom and sides. But what it mostly has is volume: a hungry space I've somehow got to fill.

The gotta, as in: __ think I__l stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out._ Even though the guy who says it spent the day at work thinking about getting laid and knows the odds are good his wife is going to be asleep when he finally gets up to the bedroom. The gotta, as in: __ know I should be starting supper now _ he__l be mad if it__ TV dinners again _ but I gotta see how this ends._ I gotta know will she live. I gotta know will he catch the shitheel who killed his father. I gotta know if she finds out her best friend__ screwing her husband. The gotta. Nasty as a hand-job in a sleazy bar, fine as a fuck from the world__ most talented call-girl. Oh boy it was bad and oh boy it was good and oh boy in the end it didn__ matter how rude it was or how crude it was because in the end it was just like the Jacksons said on that record _ don__ stop til you get enough.

I have a hardcore attitude: a __elf-published, ghost-written book_ is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. Whenpeople read a book__articularly a self-published one__hey have the right to expect that it__ the person__ writing, not cleaned-up dictation or slapping a name on a book that someone else wrote.

To become better writers we must become the best thieves and liars in the business. We slink around the pages of everyone else__ work and shove it into our pockets. Then we run home and try to make it our own.

A fiction writer weaves a fabric of lies in hopes of revealing deeper human truths.

I__ feeling a low regarding writing. I sometimes think I should finish working on my book of stripper poetry that I started, but other times I feel like it__ not worth it. Sometimes I think I should work on my comic book idea, and then other times I want to work on a website, and still other times I think I should be working on this memoir. That__ a lot of thinking about writing without a whole lot of writing going on.

A shrink and a patient switching places. Who is REALLY the boss?

I miss the days when I was alone with my characters and no one else knew them except me.

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. ~ I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called __ulture_ _ and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. ~ Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born.

The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.

If you are serious, and you want to make a living as an author, then you need to hustle. Period. If you can't make that quality, then you need to concentrate on your craft and practice more. One other thing, quality comes with practice. If you are prolific, then you become a better writer because you are writing. The more you do anything the better at it you will become. So in a way, quantity does add to quality.

I don__ need to write. Madness or suicide are other options, though not nearly as compelling. But I want to create; I hope to create worlds in my own image, admittedly a self-centered plan. I want others to understand me better, pay more attention to me, like or love me for who I am. Maybe that__ it. Or maybe I should simply learn to say, __et__ have lunch.

Many a good story has been found in the bottom of a decent Rioja.