“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.”
–Chuck Close
Source: The Mindful Writer, by Dinty W. Moore, which I’ve written about for the new (May 2012) issue of The Writer magazine.
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman
Source: Goodreads
“A generation ago, when ‘Annie Hall’ won the Oscar for Best Picture, talk therapy occupied a prominent place in our collective imagination, whether or not you partook. If you wanted to spend several hours a week baring your soul to a stranger who was professionally obligated to listen and react, you went into therapy. Today you join a writing workshop.”
Source: Steve Almond, “Why Talk Therapy Is on the Wane and Writing Workshops Are on the Rise”
(I may not agree with all of this piece, and I wouldn’t say that all workshoppers are would-be analysands. But there’s no question that I’ve been part of workshops where some of the folks in the room clearly wanted/needed to be in therapy. When I recall these individuals, I always hope that they have found the peace that seemed so sadly elusive for them.)
“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”
–Victor Hugo
Source: Goodreads “Quote of the Day”
P.S. If you haven’t yet read it, my guest post on Nancy Williams’s wonderful Reflections on a Grand Passion™ website, “Music to Write By: The Piano Music of Frédéric Chopin,” may be of interest.
“For me, the writing life doesn’t just happen when I sit at the writing desk. It is a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this: that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in. ‘My heart keeps open house,’ was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem. And rendering in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world.”
–Julia Alvarez, quoted in 1998 in The Writer magazine, with the quotation republished in “Great Writing Tips from 125 Years of The Writer,” in the magazine’s April 2012 issue.
Erika Dreifus lives and writes in New York City. Her story collection, Quiet Americans, was published in January 2011 by Last Light Studio Books. Erika is a contributing editor for The Writer magazine and Fiction Writers Review and an advisory board member for J Journal: New Writing on Justice, and she wrote the section on “Choosing a Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing” for the second edition of Tom Kealey’s Creative Writing MFA Handbook (Continuum, 2008). Erika’s writing practice encompasses fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Erika is also the editor/publisher of The Practicing Writer, a free (and popular) e-newsletter featuring advice, opportunities, and resources on the craft and business of writing for fictionists, poets, and writers of creative nonfiction.
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