Etiqueta: Anne Lamott

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How to write fiction

A desperate business

men in gray suit inside the office
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Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.

Bird by bird. Anne Lamott

And that’s the alcoholic’s motto. Just today. Survive just today. However, it is not like writing is to be alcoholic. It’s just that life itself can be overwhelming.

Creating life, breathing life into something that only seems alive; for it can’t get up and exist just because, is exactly as taxing as coping with the real thing. Or it was. Now we have beautiful worlds in which the horrible people just get arrested, disappear through the door or stay behind with the shitty jockey team.

I wonder if that is us being more coward or being braver… Be brave. Survive today’s page, today’s scene, today’s poem. Pasto kalo.

Categorías
How to write fiction

No GPS

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«writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.»

E. L. Doctorow. Quote found in Bird by bird. Anne Lamott

Ahem. I need the ending. That’s like my GPS. True the bloody device urges to make U turns in forbidden places and wants me to change goals and add stops I’d prefer not taking but still. If I don’t know that at least, I’m so lost I can’t even divide into lesser tasks.

However, this time I feel like writing a nonogram. A very big nonogram. 80×80 squares. And Ziggy has a humongous memory.

Have fun trying to see beyond the headlights in the darkness. Pasto kalo.

Categorías
How to write fiction

Again, the truth

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The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.

Bird by bird. Anne Lamott

I think the one thing not working here is “the truth”. We don’t want the truth. We want excitement; we want things that aren’t there. We want the spirit of the lion watching over us because it is scary for random things happening; in spite of all our care trying not to fall down the hole we haven’t seen. And this is our first lie: we want the truth.

Sheep lice don’t write because they don’t have to record how many sheep they have sucked to pay taxes (and maybe, omit a few nano-litters in order to not go bloodrup). Add that they concentrate on sucking, not in pretending to be nice beings taking away the over exert of blood pressure for the sheep to feel better. Or, maybe, that sheep fuss is a signal from heaven to keep on sucking instead of letting go.

I don’t know. Maybe this is only because I don’t have such a good memory to remember what I got from the Three wise kings when I was 10 or what the adults said in this or that situation.

Maybe. Enjoy figuring out what you want to write about. If inventing is easier that telling the truth. Pasto kalo.