( Read more... )

As I said at the close of yesterday's post, today I'm talking about another reason for writing avoidance. It takes different shapes and colors with different people and goes by different names - perfectionism being one of them - but it comes down to fear. Essentially, it's the fear that we aren't good enough to pull off whatever we're working on, ( Read more... )

Well, hello again! I seem to have turned up after all.

The thing about writing avoidance, which I started discussing in yesterday's post is that it is SO much easier than, well, actually writing. There is always something to be done. Today, for instance, I have started some laundry, cleaned the litter box, made tea and consumed it with some ( Read more... )

You can read some of my thoughts about Stephen King's marvelous book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft over at Guys Lit Wire.

And now, I'm for bed.



( Read more... )

( Read more... )

It's funny how, if you're open to thinking in slightly tangential ways, you can learn lots of writing- or author-related things in non-authorial settings. Like that time four years ago when I posted ten lessons I'd learned from watching Top Chef. This time, my lesson was derived from recent outings at rock concerts ( Read more... )

In the dedication of his book, It, and in his comments to the National Book Foundation crowd, Stephen King notes that "fiction is the truth inside the lie." In On Writing, he opines that "the job of fiction is to find the truth inside the story's web of lies." King is talking about using honesty in the language you select and the actions and ( Read more... )

Today's quote is, of course, from the Edgar Allen Poe poem "The Raven".

On first drafts

Bernard Malamud said that the first draft "is the most uncertain-- where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better."

On revision

Well, in a way. I just finished reading A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett. And somewhere back ( Read more... )

Another Sunday, another episode of quoteskimming; this time, it's the "baby steps" edition.

The movie What About Bob?, starring Bill Murray as a needy, panphobic patient named Bob and Richard Dreyfuss as his frazzled therapist, Dr. Leo Marvin, came out in 1991. In it, Dr. Marvin tries to help Bob overcome some of his many phobias by encouraging ( Read more... )

It's Sunday, and you know what that means. It's time for some quoteskimming.

From one of today's masters, Stephen King, in his book, On Writing. I'm not sure this answers questions posed this week by The Mighty Dotificus or Susan Taylor Brown, both of whom have asked "real-place setting or not"? But I do think it's an awesome quote about making a ( Read more... )