“Life will go on as long as there is someone to sing, to dance, to tell stories and to listen.” —Oren Lyons Share your story at: StoryShelter, “a free service that lets you write down the personal stories of your life, save them and selectively share them. StoryShelter was founded in 2012 by Melisa Singh.”
Category: Quotes
“Move to a position of wisdom and power . . . ” DeSalvo
“If we write about our pain, we heal gradually, instead of feeling powerless and confused, and we move to a position of wisdom and power.” — Writing As A Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo
Twenty-six letters.
Neil Gaiman, excerpt from Brain Pickings, “Why We Read and What Books Do for the Human Experience“ When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed. — Neil Gaiman https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/08/03/neil-gaiman-view-from-the-cheap-seats-reading/
I’m sorry you are experiencing this.
This Write Spot Blog Post is inspired by The Writings of Tim Lawrence, The Adversity Within, Shining Light on Dark Places. Tim offers ideas in his blog post about helping someone who is grieving: “I acknowledge your pain. I am here with you.” “Grief is brutally painful. Grief does not only occur when someone dies. When relationships fall apart, you grieve. When opportunities are shattered, you grieve. When dreams die, you grieve. When illnesses wreck you, you grieve. So I’m going to repeat a few words I’ve uttered countless times: Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried. These words come from my dear friend Megan Devine, one of the only writers in the field of loss and trauma I endorse. These words are so poignant because they aim right at the pathetic platitudes our culture has come to embody on an increasingly hopeless level. Losing a child cannot…
Force yourself . . . and don’t stop . . .
“Force yourself to begin putting words on the page immediately, and don’t stop until the timer goes off, even if you have to write about the weather.” — Jan Ellison, inspired by Ellen Sussman I read this quote in the 12/4/15 Writer’s Digest guest blog post, “9 Practical Tricks for Writing Your First Novel,” written by Jan Ellison. Since Ellen Sussman was scheduled to be a Writers Forum presenter and since I also believe this philosophy . . . my ears perked up. . . . Daydreaming about how “ears perked up” would look and could it really happen? I think so, in a Fred Flintstone kind of way, when he’s . . . Oops, I’m taking the writing advice to put words on the page too literally. And the timer is ticking. Brian Klems, host of The Writer’s Dig Blog where this post appears, gives this introduction to the…
When we accumulated silent things within us . . .
“What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak….it was born in the moments when we accumulated silent things within us.” ― Gaston Bachelard I first learned of Gaston Bachelard from my writing teacher, Terry Ehret, with her response to my poem, “What I Learned.” Terry wrote on my paper, “Here’s a quote from Gaston Bachelard (French philosopher) that your poem makes me think of.” I’m no poet, but it’s been fun to dabble. Click on Prompt #221, to read “What I Learned.” (scroll down)
“I really don’t believe in a wasted draft.”
Novelist Téa Obreht: “I don’t believe in a wasted draft . . . Even work you consider to be your worst is good for something. Every effort teaches you about your desires and tendencies, or guides you toward some new possibility . . . every line you wrote . . . has value.” —Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger’s Wife, interviewed by Gabriel Packard, “Writers On Writing,” The Writer magazine, May 2016
Writers are incorrigible thieves. — Rachael Herron
The excerpt below is from the Conversation Guide at the back of The Ones Who Matter Most. Question: What might surprise a reader of The Ones Who Matter Most? Author Rachael Herron answers: Writing the scene in which Abby is scrabbling through the rolltop desk’s drawers was a special treat. Writers are incorrigible thieves, stealing bits and pieces of their lives to provide sparkle and heft. We can’t help populating our books with parts of ourselves. I share Abby’s optimistic naiveté as much as I do Fern’s ruthless practicality. But beyond the stolen personality pieces, we steal actual objects. That’s my desk in Scott’s office. As Abby explores the many small drawers, Abby wonders why they aren’t being made useful. They could hold hair bands and gum and those wonderful yellow Paper Mate pencils. In my office, those drawers do hold those things. Found in an antiques store in a…
The First Poem — Lucille Clifton
“Poetry began when somebody walked off a savannah or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, ‘Ah-h-h!’ That was the first poem.” — Lucille Clifton Photo by Colby Drake
The why must never be obvious.
“Ah, but my dear sir, the why must never be obvious. That is the whole point.” ― Agatha Christie, Five Little Pigs