next year’s words

ALT

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

When you have been on fire for long enough it becomes very difficult to disentangle it from yourself. You lurch from place to place screaming and flailing, but you do not think, “There is an underlying self here that would not be lurching from place to place screaming and flailing, were they only not on fire.” You try to concentrate on your work but every time you try to type something your keyboard melts and every time you try to concentrate you get distracted by the awful pain. This, you inevitably take to be evidence of your own poor character. Look at you, always melting keyboards. Always screaming. Where would you be, if you were not on fire? What would you be doing? Are you even really capable of not being on fire? You have long since forgotten such concerns as these, recalibrating your expectations of yourself to match a brand imposed from the outside in.

Posted to Lepontic Record, by Diane Drees, 8/14/17

“More and more I think there’s an element of fiction writing that’s performative. If you want your stories to carry a particular charge of feeling, you have to experience that feeling while you’re working. I don’t know that you can fake it, or at least I don’t know that I’ve ever been able to fake it, because the choices you make when you’re writing—the rhythms you adopt, the phrases you construct, the effect one word has when it’s nestled alongside another—are so highly nuanced, and have so much to do with the ultimate emotional effect of a story, so that if you aren’t feeling along with your sentences, your instincts will gradually lead you astray.”

ALT

Ada Limón, from “Dead Stars.” [ID in alt text]

“Writing a novel is an enormous undertaking, and self-doubt will be part of that process. There will be days you just don’t know if you can do it. And on those days what is gonna save you is your process. Your ritual. So if you’re just starting to write a novel, go create that process, go create that ritual.”

“The truth is, a writer’s voice is made from other writers’ voices. Pieced together, picked and chosen, stumbled into, uninformed: influence seems like an involuntary series of contagions that eventually turns into a sort of vessel, or transportation system. As we acquire a sense of taste, and perhaps a sense of vocation, our reading becomes more directed and targeted, but we are bent and shaped and destined to be changed by the genius of others. Compare it to the theory behind cannibalism, if you like. One eats the heart of the admired one and becomes them. The remarkable news is that this pastiche of voices results in the incarnation of a new poet, a new hybrid distillation of voice, capable of telling the story of experience in new, valuable ways. […] Each strong new writer is a deep student of what he or she has read and an amalgam of preexisting sentences and styles that have never been combined like that before. The idea that writerly originality appears from nowhere, or exists as something in isolation, a thing to be guarded and protected from influence, is lunacy. Anyone who doesn’t school themselves by deep, wide, and idiosyncratic reading is choosing aesthetic poverty.”

Mistress Mary went a step nearer to the robin and looked at him very hard. 'I'm lonely,' she said.

She had not known before that this was one of the things which made her feel sour and cross. She seemed to find it out when the robin looked at her and she looked at the robin.

“Perhaps that is what it is like being with other people. Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the world in ways you would rather not.”