"A writer is..."

I love when writers talk about what writers are.  Here are a few descriptions I've
come across recently...

A writer is a world trapped in a person.  - Victor Hugo

A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.
- Joy Williams

By Kevin Lucbert

on writing - a few quotes on short stories

When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in
love with the world around you.  - George Saunders

Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common.  Both depend on what
communication-theorists sometimes called "exformation," which is a certain
quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such
a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. 
- David Foster Wallace

The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's
whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.  - Emma Donoghue

a dreamer's wisdom - jack london

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow,
than a sleepy and permanent planet. 

- Jack London

photo stories - places as storytelling heavyweights

The sense of place is as essential to good and honest writing as a logical mind;
surely they are somewhere related.  It is by knowing where you stand that you
grow able to judge where you are.  Place absorbs our earliest notice and
attention, it bestows on us our original awareness; and our critical powers
spring up from the study of it and the growth of experience inside it.  It
perseveres in bringing us back to earth when we fly too high. It never really
stops informing us, for it is forever astir, alive, changing, reflecting, like the
mind of man itself.  One place comprehended can make us understand other 
places better.  Sense of place gives equilibrium; extended, it is sense of direction
too.  Carried off we might be in spirit, and should be, when we are reading or
writing something good.

- Eudora Welty

I like this idea that a full comprehension of one place - say, the place in which we
grew up - can help us to understand other places better.  If a writer has let one
place into herself, future places - real or imagined - states, towns, buildings, even
fascinating rooms - might better get in too.  All the better for conveying these
places to others.

By Vanessa Morrow

By Jake Messenger

By Rachel Chew

on writing - the rarer wisdoms

Bring all your intelligence to bear on your beginning.
- Elizabeth Bowen

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it,
all, right away, every time.  Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the
book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.  The impulse to save
something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now.  Something
more will arise for later, something better.  These things fill from behind, from
beneath, like well water.  Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have
learned is not only shameful, it is destructive.  Anything you do not give freely and
abundantly becomes lost to you.  You open your safe and find ashes.
- Annie Dillard

By Jen Corace

photo stories and a note on writing intimacy

In a written story, intimacy can be communicated through a variety of things, in a variety
of places, via a variety of senses, but in utilizing these, it's most important for the sake of
the reader for something unique to be communicated, something past cliche, something
impossible to grasp if the scene were portrayed on film.  This is the power of words, after
all, to tell a story - a truth - better than most other mediums can.

See these examples:

He moved his fingers down her whole spine, one by one by one, and during the time it took
to do that, his brain remained absolutely quiet.  It is these empty spaces you have to watch
out for, as they flood up with feeling before you even realize what's happened; before you
find yourself, at the base of her spine, different.
- The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Aimee Bender

Unthinkingly I straightened, so that she would think better of me.  Such was her presence.
- The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin

The skin of her hand looked transparent in the light, on the edge of his desk, a young girl's
hand with long, thin fingers, relaxed for a moment, defenseless.
- Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

He wants only her stalking beauty, her theater of expressions.  He wants the minute and
secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, then foreignness intimate like
two pages of a closed book.  He has been disassembled by her.  And if she has brought
him to this, what has he brought her to?
- The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje

So, these photos.  What could words add to the storytelling present in these photos?  How
could words take these images of intimacy from slightly distant to up-close, vivid,
unforgettable?  What might be said beyond describing the light, the assumed sensations
of touch?  What details might be added to take a scene from typical to truly intimate,
almost disarmingly so for the reader?

By Hana Haley

on reading - diane setterfield

There is something about words.  In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take
you prisoner.  Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when
you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood,
numb your thoughts.  Inside you they work their magic.

- Diane Setterfield

By Daniela Tieni

illustration - devon smith - young women to write about

If anything can inspire a story, it's these illustrations by Devon Smith - women
riddled with melancholy, apathy, determination, suspicion, and yearning.
Devon enjoys reading old science fiction novels.  She relates to two truths that
seem common to most breeds of artist: that you must create for yourself alone,
and that a common struggle will be your audience not matching your
enthusiasm for a work.

Take a look and see if any of her illustrations prompt a story for you...

on writing - wisdom on style

Style means the right word. The rest matters little.   - Jules Renard

A good style must, first of all, be clear. It must not be mean or above the dignity
of the subject. It must be appropriate.   - Aristotle 

If any man wishes to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts;
and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
- Goethe 

The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear
into the thought.   - Nathaniel Hawthorne

by Olivia Jeffries

a dreamer's wisdom - us and the world

I am passionate about everything in my life - first and foremost,
passionate about ideas.  And that's a dangerous person to be in this
society, not just because I'm a woman, but because it's such a
fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society.  
- Bell Hooks

Franz Kafka noted that happiness for him consisted in raising the
world "into the pure, the truth, and the immutable."

Ordinary life does not interest me.  I seek only the high moments.
I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.
I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist;
I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite
dimension.  - Anais Nin

Mary L. Macomber, "Night and Her Daughter Sleep" (detail)

on writing - the role and definition of talent

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when
one will do.   - Thomas Jefferson

Talented writing tends to contain more information, sentence for
sentence, clause for clause, than merely good writing...  It also
employs rhetorical parallels and differences...  It pays attention to the
sounds and rhythms of its sentences...  Much of the information it
proffers is implied...  These are among the things that indicate talent.
- Samuel R. Delaney

There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently-talented
writer can't get a good story out of it.  - Lawrence Watt-Evans

Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities.
The other, unfortunately, is talent.  - Ernest Hemingway

By Sanna Helena Berger

on writing - james richardson

Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to
perfect clarity you make a new smear.   - James Richardson

By Liis Klammer

photo stories - anchors

I love those moments of exposition in books or short stories where the
perfect words, the perfect rhythms are accomplished and the reader is
transported, bewitched.  The moment, the sight, becomes their own,
years later something they look back on as if it had been real.  In these
scenes or paragraphs, certain sights or sounds often become anchors,
be it the way the girl's scarf flapped in the wind, or the way the moss
grew on the rooftop, or how that the toy in the window banged its little
cymbals.  The scene is lodged into the reader's mind, becoming a spark
of life that propels them through the pages.

These photos feel like that - living anchors.
May we write our anchors well.

By Molly Yun He

By Yung Sad

on reading - voltaire

Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous
author is admirable.  For my part I read only to please myself and like
only what suits my taste.

- Voltaire, Candide

illustration - carolina raquel antich

Carolina's paintings are filled with strange children put up against stark
backgrounds, with little suggestions of context - mist, water, a forest, a
deep hole.  The scenes she creates are ripe with interesting stories, from
kids playing with battleships in a flood, to a golden family with ten
mysterious children.

Be inspired.  And write on.

a dreamer's wisdom - gabrielle roth

It takes immense discipline to be a free spirit.

- Gabrielle Roth

By Catrin Welz-Stein

on writing - psychological barriers

Minds go from intuition to articulation to self-defense, which is what they
die of.    - James Richardson

No surprises for the writer, no surprises for the reader.    - Robert Frost

I think of this sometimes - how sensitivity to the world either means you
get lauded for it, get paid for it, get celebrated and loved for it; or at another
moment, feel burdened by it, or unable to deal, or panicked, or scared, or
shut down.    - Aimee Bender

Begin to write always before the impression of novelty has worn off from
your mind, else you will be apt to think that the peculiarities which at first
attracted you are not worth recording; yet those slight peculiarities are the
very things that make the most vivid impression upon the reader.  Think
nothing too trifling to write down, so it will be in the smallest degree
characteristic.  You will be surprised to find, on re-persuing your journal,
what an importance and graphic power these little particulars assume.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne

By Alessandro Lupi

on reading - 3 wisdoms

The dead are still writing. Every morning, somewhere, is a line, a
passage, a whole book you are sure wasn’t there yesterday.
- James Richardson

There is divine beauty in learning... To learn means to accept the
postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here
before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were
composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters,
teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their
quests. And so are you.
- Elie Wiesel

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and
bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those,
dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag - and
never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because
it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which
bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when
you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its
right time for you.
- Doris Lessing

By Isabelle Arsenault

on writing - walter benjamin

I love this well-worded bit of writing advice from Walter Benjamin:

Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as
the authorities keep their register of aliens.

Yes.

on writing - wendy lesser

The great novelist (unlike the clever, tricky novelist...) does not
construct an entirely new fictional world each time he writes a novel.
He cannot choose to do that as his inferiors can because the world he
visits in his fiction has a reality for him that is not entirely of his own
willed making.

- Wendy Lesser

By Andrea Wan