Category: Quotes

  • Concrete Details

    J.T. Bushnell wrote, “I once burst into tears during a Tobias Wolff reading . . . as Wolff intoned the final passages from ‘Bullet in the Brain,’ I broke the silence of the packed auditorium with a gasp, a sob.”

    Bushnell goes on to explain his strong emotional reaction.

    “It was the final scene that set me off.”

    This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game.

    “Half a page later, the story ends with the passage that brought me to a fever pitch.”

    For now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the field, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt.

    “These passages by themselves seem innocuous enough. Each offers a series of descriptions, nothing more. But the conclusion I’ve come to over the years is that the description is exactly what produced my reaction.

    By description I mean the concrete, the things we can observe with our five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. I do not mean simple adjectives. I do not mean descriptions such as ‘The weather was glorious.’ Glory is an abstraction. The glorious is useless because it can’t show us anything concrete.

    It can’t show a white-hot sun perched overhead, or a sky so hard and blue that a fly ball might shatter it. It can’t show a pitcher’s shadow puddled under his cleats, or heat rising from the ground in shimmering corrugation. It can’t produce the smell of hot aluminum bleachers. It can’t let you taste the sweat on your lip when you go too long between slugs of cold beer. Only concrete description can do that.

    As novelist Richard Bausch advises,  . . .  a good story is about experience, not concepts and certainly not abstractions. . . . get rid of all those places where you are commenting on things, and let the things stand for themselves. Be clear about the details that can be felt on the skin and in the nerves.”

    Excerpted from “The Heart and the Eye, How Description Can Access Emotion” by J.T. Bushnell, Jan/Feb 2013 Poets & Writers

    Marlene C

  • What writing brings you joy?

    “I write because I believe my words can change the world. Every paragraph, every sentence, every syllable I construct is written with the express intention of changing people and their families. I hope as you read this you are in fact changing and I hope you’ll let your families read this so they can change too.

    Of course I’m kidding.

    I write for cash and because as a child I was told I had excellent penmanship.”

    “What’s the writing that makes you happy? That’s the writing to do.” 

    Doug Ellin, Creator, Executive Producer, “Entourage”

    From September 2005 issue of Writer’s Digest magazine

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  • Comparison is a threat to joy

    “Comparison is a threat to joy. We tend to move through life comparing ourselves to others, and it’s anti-creative and pointless.” — Tony Goldwyn. actor

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  • The personal essay is an act . . .

    “The personal essay begins as an act of exploration. We write in order to figure out where we’re going and make sense of where we’ve been.” — Susan Bono

    Susan Bono is an extraordinary writer whose words go right to the heart. You can read her excellent writing in her collection of short essays in
    What Have We Here: Essays about Keeping House and Finding Home.

    Susan is a writing teacher and freelance editor specializing in memoir. She facilitates writing workshops at Copperfield’s Books in Petaluma. California.

    Marlene C

  • Write so the reader is a part of the experience

    “A writer’s problem does not change. It’s always how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.” — Ernest Hemingway

     

    Photo by Breana Marie

    Marlene C

  • The reader reads for dialogue.

    “The reader reads for dialogue more than anything.

    The writer’s habit is to describe, but the reader would rather hear the character.”

    —    Anthony Varallo, May 2017, The Writer

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  • Writers are such heady creatures . . .

    “Writes are such heady creatures that we often forget our characters have bodies and senses. To fully imagine a life, one has to supply undeniable details about the exterior world so that when the novelist has to make the truly improbable leap to the interior world of another human being, the reader is primed to believe us.”  —Julianna Baggott

    Excerpt from “Pure Writer,” by Elfrieda Abbe, The Writer Magazine, January 2016

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  • Connect to the language of your work

     

    “You have to connect to the language of your work by paying attention to what you’re trying to say. Sometimes what you want to say doesn’t come easy. That’s fine. Give yourself time to make mistakes, to start again, to scrap good pieces that are going nowhere.” — Virgil Suárez

     

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  • Immerse the reader

    “Writers can learn a lot from reading comic books and graphic novels, such as about brevity. Of course, comics do have the benefit of imagery. That said, the importance of scene can’t be understated. I’m always telling my students: Show us moments instead of wildly narrating an entire story and describing what’s happening. Try to find ways to immerse the reader.” Roxane Gay, September 2017 Writer’s Digest

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  • Success in writing means . . .

     If you have attended a Jumpstart Writing Workshop, you may have heard me say, “There are two kinds of writing I like. One is when the writing speaks to universal truths—something we can all relate to. The other is when the writing speaks to me personally.”

    This excerpt from “The Review Rat Race,” a “5-Minute Memoir” by Barbara Solomon Josselsohn expands upon that thought.

    “To me, success meant having readers who felt that my novel articulated something important, something they had felt deeply inside but had never been able to express or fully understand before my book came along.” —Barbara Solomon Josselsohn *

    That often happens in Jumpstart . . . the writing touches us deeply as the writer articulates in ways that we hadn’t been able to express or understand prior to hearing their freewrite.

    * Excerpt from January 2017 issue of Writer’s Digest Magazine.

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