{"id":3968,"date":"2015-10-15T12:15:31","date_gmt":"2015-10-15T19:15:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/?p=3968"},"modified":"2015-10-15T12:15:31","modified_gmt":"2015-10-15T19:15:31","slug":"become-the-writer-you-want-to-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/become-the-writer-you-want-to-be\/","title":{"rendered":"Become The Writer You Want To Be"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\">&#8220;Writing is an act of courage.&#8221; \u2014 Ta-Nehisi Coates<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I always consider the entire [writing] process about failure, and I think that&#8217;s the reason why more people don&#8217;t write.&#8221; \u2014 Ta-Nehisi Coates<\/p>\n<p>Ta-Nehisi Coates\u2019s latest book, <em>Between the World and Me<\/em>, is a &#8220;searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today.&#8221; \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/07\/10\/books\/review-in-between-the-world-and-me-ta-nehisi-coates-delivers-a-desperate-dispatch-to-his-son.html?_r=0\" target=\"_blank\">The New York Times Review<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Upon receiving the 2015 MacArthur &#8216;Genius&#8217; Award Winners, Coates said, &#8220;When I first got the call from the MacArthur foundation I was ecstatic. . . if anybody even reads what I&#8217;m doing, that&#8217;s a great day.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><em>Between the World and Me<\/em> is a finalist for the Kirkus Prize for nonfiction.<\/p>\n<p><em>Between the World and Me<\/em> is in the form of a letter to Ta-Nehisi&#8217;s 14-year-old son. He speaks of the dangers of living in a country where unarmed black men and boys are dying at the hands of police officers.<\/p>\n<p>His evocative 2008 memoir, <em>The Beautiful Struggle<\/em>, is a &#8220;. . . compelling a portrait of a father-son relationship . . . and a showcase for his emotional reach as a writer and his both lyric and gritty prose.&#8221; &#8211; The New York Times Review<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Ta-Nehisi-Coates.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-3972 alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Ta-Nehisi-Coates.jpg\" alt=\"Ta-Nehisi Coates\" width=\"200\" height=\"178\" \/><\/a>Ta-Nehisi&#8217;s chatty and thoughtful <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/video\/archive\/2013\/09\/advice-on-writing-from-i-the-atlantic-i-s-ta-nehisi-coates\/280025\/\" target=\"_blank\">video<\/a> drew me in. He said the key to writing is perseverance. He talks about learning to be a writer and that being stressed led to writing that had much more power. &#8220;Repeated practice to become the writer you want to be. Revise over and over until [your writing] goes from really bad to okay to acceptable.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ta-Nehisi_Coates\" target=\"_blank\">Ta-Nehisi Coates<\/a> writes from the heart. My favorite kind of writing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Writing is an act of courage.&#8221; \u2014 Ta-Nehisi Coates &#8220;I always consider the entire [writing] process about failure, and I think that&#8217;s the reason why more people don&#8217;t write.&#8221; \u2014 Ta-Nehisi Coates Ta-Nehisi Coates\u2019s latest book, Between the World and Me, is a &#8220;searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today.&#8221; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[104],"tags":[770],"class_list":["post-3968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guest-bloggers","tag-ta-nehisi-coates"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p43Dj8-120","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3968"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3974,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3968\/revisions\/3974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}