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Needs must?
Would any fiction writer I know find good use in the expression "needs must," as in, "Well, if needs must then we'll do that horrid thing we don't want to do..."?
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"I HAVE TO WRITE because I don't know what else to do with my mind, how else to make sense of the world and its inhabitants. For whatever reason, I have trained myself, for many years, to do this thing. And when I don't do this thing, I get crazy. No amount of yoga, bicycle racing, rapacious sex, or buying things can take the place of writing. If I ( Read more... ) -
Samuel R. Delany on "Sophomoric" Texts
"... as every teacher knows, there are a lot of highly seductive texts-what one might called "sophomoric” texts-that can be greatly enjoyable and seem extremely fresh and new to not particularly widely educated readers. The problem is that they tend not to lead readers on to other works, especially once they become broadly popular. Rather, they ( Read more... ) -
Thich Nhat Hanh wishes you a Happy October: Your Skeleton
"Your skeleton ( Read more... ) -
"Salinger: The Movie" still feels like a strange phrase to say.
In seeing Salinger, I was blown away by it-and I’ve never wanted to be a writer more than I did as I left Hollywood Hits in Danvers. (Don’t worry. The feeling faded.) Yet it’s a strange film because it's a documentary that serves to remove gaps from a subject that remains relatively unknown. It's almost a movie about how hard it is to make a movie ( Read more... ) -
Chogyam Trungpa on Trapping Monkey Mind
[Still stuck mostly cutting and pasting because of an arm injury, but this seemed relevant to my circumstances, especially if I overextend the metaphor and think of self-entrapment as a two-way street.]
First, you develop a sense of accuracy in relating with your thoughts and your mind-with the neuroses of all kinds of things that develop in one’s ( Read more... ) -
"I don't need a protagonist to be a nice person; I just need them to be interesting." Jeff VanderMee
"I think one of my concerns as a writer these days--just kinda in the back of my mind sometimes--is whether most readers read for the things I do, since obviously that's what's going to manifest in my writing. For example, I don't read to have my basic values and positions reaffirmed. I also don't read to see reflections of the world I already move ( Read more... )
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