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We amateurs think we have to wait for the big idea, the next scene, the next line, to arrive before we sit down to work. But the pros know the Muse sits in wait for us, gifts in hand, expecting us to show up and honor our intentions to write. [Read on...]
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Besides being MAD about Words, I’m mad about the movies. I often take The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, by Michael Ondaatje down off my bookshelf and read it again to feed my two obsessions. Murch is an Academy Award winning film editor who worked on “The Godfather” and many other [...]
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“Everyone who writes strives for the same thing. To say it swiftly, clearly, to say the hard thing that way, using few words. Not to gum up the paragraph. To know when to quit when you’ve done. And not to have hangovers of other ideas sifting in unnoticed. Good writing is precisely like good dressing. [...]
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This week, another gift from the sea.
“If the oyster had hands, there would be no pearl. Because the oyster is forced to live with the irritation for an extended period of time, the pearl comes to be…. Mistakes and accidents can be irritating grains that become pearls; they present us with unforeseen opportunities, they are [...]
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I’m away on a little vacation, but I’m still thinking of you, and I remembered this remark by the great John Gardner, because I’m in sand-castle-building territory.
“The best way of all for dealing with writer’s block is never to get it. Some writers never do. Theoretically there’s no reason one should get it, if one [...]
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I saw the Julie & Julia movie yesterday. Julia Child’s fearlessness, her joyful energy and passion, drove her to success. Author Annie Dillard doesn’t hold back either. Isn’t interesting how often good writing advice makes good life advice, too?
“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play [...]
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I can play with sentences for hours and hours.
“There’s no reason you should write any novel quickly. There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly. More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn’t [...]
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This year I resolved to be more lighthearted (not to be confused with less diligent or less thoughtful). It has been freeing and productive to take my writing (and my self) less seriously.
“Yes, writing can be complicated, exhausting, isolating, abstracting, boring, dulling, briefly exhilarating; it can be made to be grueling and demoralizing. And occasionally [...]
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I don’t know about you, but I find it comforting when a famous author says that writing doesn’t come easily. Early success led Michael Cunningham to believe writing and publishing would continue to be easy for him. Then he struggled for years before he was published again. Talent and skill matter, but they don’t count [...]
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Dani Shapiro, on writing her memoir, Slow Motion: “I began to write my book in earnest, which is to say that I began to sift through my memory to find the shape of the story. This remembering was a delicate alchemy: part archaeology, part forensics and — perhaps the most important part — a powerful [...]
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MAD about Words
created by
Mary Ann de Stefano
Cool, clear-eyed seeker of
wisdom and truth.
I believe in you.
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