GRIEF January 17, 2007
Posted by thenaturalist in Grief and Grieving.add a comment
Robert Frost wrote no poems about his personal sorrows and cautioned another writer to write about anything else in the world save her own personal grief. “It must be kept way down under the surface where great griefs belong,” he wrote.
BEING A WRITER January 16, 2007
Posted by thenaturalist in Writing.add a comment
Alan Bennett — British author, playwright, and actor — says, “A writer is only a writer when writing. The rest is marking time.” So does that mean all it takes is writing? No publishing? No finishing anything? Just writing and writing and writing? That seems easy enough ….
AGE AND RISK January 15, 2007
Posted by thenaturalist in Age.add a comment
Jenny Allen, who had been a magazine writer for 30 years, decided she’d like to try writing stories, but she was afraid to take the risk. She says, “I was terrified to take a chance like this…. I don’t know what I was thinking. Did I think I was going to get in trouble?” Then she decided to go ahead and write a story called “The Long Chalkboard” — and then two more. She says of her decision, “It may be an age thing: I mean, with only so many more years left in my life, how much do I really have to lose?” Her stories have been published as The Long Chalkboard and Other Stories. They are illustrated by her husband, Jules Feiffer….
WASTE, LONELINESS, AND BAD IDEAS January 14, 2007
Posted by thenaturalist in Interesting.add a comment
In an essay on skin, Andrea Jones, says, “Your skin’s position at your body’s outer edge obligates it with protective functions. It guards the tender tissues of your interior from heat, cold, pathogens, and the sharp edges of the world. But to be alive — to be human — you have to let certain things in. Lest you explode from the weight of your waste, loneliness, and bad ideas, you must also let some things out.” Amen….
BEAUTY January 13, 2007
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Confucius said, “Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
FICTION AND WRITER’S BLOCK January 12, 2007
Posted by thenaturalist in Fiction, Writing.add a comment
On January 12, 2007, E. L. Doctorow was invited to speak to an AP English class at Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C. When they asked him how he wrote his novel Ragtime, he said that he hadn’t begun with an outline or even an idea of what the story was. He started with just a description of a house, a neighborhood and a moment in time, “Fiction gets written almost as if you’re writing to find out what you’re writing,” he said.
When they asked him about writer’s block, he said, “You can get it when you’re writing the wrong thing. The right thing flows.”
CLUTTER January 6, 2007
Posted by thenaturalist in Einstein.add a comment
Albert Einstein said, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then is an empty desk?” So maybe there’s hope for me after all.
