“I would tell students to make their characters want something right away even if it’s only a glass of water.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
Source: Quoted by @MonicaAli, via @AlexanderChee
(I love this quotation because it reminds me of advice from one of my favorite writing teachers of all time, Sands Hall.)
I met Sarah Stone many years ago at a conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and she has long impressed me as a very smart writer. So I wasn’t surprised to see this words of wisdom show up on her Twitter feed sometime this past week:
#writing note: put your people between a rock and a hard place. Don’t put them on a rock and then have them think about it.
SO TRUE!
“[W]hy I think you need courage as a writer is that at every step of the way you need the courage to believe you have something to say, you need the courage to make this a priority in your life, because often there are the other people saying you need to get a job, or why are you wasting your time, or whoever’s voice is in your head, so you need courage for that. You need the courage to show your writing to someone else, whether it’s people in your writing group, or your spouse, or a potential agent, or a potential magazine editor. So then, you need the courage to keep going when your writing is turned down, as it probably will be—I don’t know any writer who hasn’t had that experience. And then, you need the courage once it’s accepted to put it out int he world, and hear what people think of it, you’ll need the courage to live through bad reviews, most likely, or tepid reviews, you’ll need the courage to stand up to people who disagree with you, you’ll need courage in the face of offending people—every step of the way, you’ll need the inner core of strength, or what we say in Hebrew, ‘koach‘ to get you through.”
Source: Lesléa Newman, interviewed by Renée Olander in The Writer’s Chronicle, May/Summer 2011.
“The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.”
–Source: Stephen King (Born 1947) Best Selling Author
via Quotes4Writers (and isn’t it the truth???)
“Like [his student], I am but one teacher who has had a few memorable teachers. Yet I have spread their thoughts and inventions abroad like a town crier. And I have learned over the years that my students have taken those same thoughts and inventions and have done as I have done. For my Modern Poetry course, the students’ assignment is to produce an anthology of poems. I put some forty recently published books of poems by contemporary poets on reserve in the university library. Throughout the term, along with our discussions in class of established modern poets – Elizabeth Bishop, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, William Empson, Margaret Atwood, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Robert Graces, and the like – I ask the students to read the forty new books, which we do not discuss in class, and select ten poems from different authors for their anthologies. Then I ask them to write a ten-page introduction explaining their choices. By the end of the course they have created a little book that speaks for their taste. It is a wonderful assignment, and not my own.”
–Roger Rosenblatt
Source: Rosenblatt, Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing. Rosenblatt attributes the assignment to John L. Sweeney, curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard – a brilliant, courtly teacher who looked like the actor Edmund Gwen, and whose Modern Poetry class I lucked into when I was a first-year graduate student.”