Writing Quote Friday #9

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”

― Toni Morrison

Writing Quote Friday #8

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

― Maya Angelou

Writing Quote Friday #7

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” 

Robert Frost

Revelation by Robert Frost

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated hear
Till someone really find us out.

'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
At hid-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.

Writing Quote Friday #6

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

Sylvia Plath

Writing Quote Friday #5

"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."

Mark Twain

Writing Quote Friday #3

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."

~Benjamin Franklin

Writing Quote Friday #2

This Friday's quote on writing comes to us courtesy of About.com.

"If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day. The consistency, the monotony, the certainty, all vagaries and passions are covered by this daily reoccurrence. You don't go to a well once but daily. You don't skip a child's breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning. Sleep comes to you each day, and so does the muse." (July 2000)

~Walter Mosley

Source

Quotes

This month I'm participating in the A to Z Blogger's Challenge, found here. Every day of April (except for Sundays), we are posting a blog with the theme of A to Z.

Q is for Quotes.

More specifically, one quote: 

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."  ~E.L. Doctorow

This is one of my all time favorite quotes about writing.

As a writer, I have a thousand little voices in my head. As I go through my day, I am bombarded with voices. I see a car on the road driving recklessly, and I think that would be a great scene in a novel. I'm in a coffee shop and I overhear someone talking about their son who is in jail, and I think there's my next plot.

According to PubMed:

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that makes it hard to:

• Tell the difference between what is real and not real 
• Think clearly 
• Have normal emotional responses 
• Act normally in social situations 

At first, you may have the following symptoms:

• Irritable or tense feeling 
• Trouble concentrating 
• Trouble sleeping 

Disorganized schizophrenia symptoms may include:

• Childlike behavior 
• Problems thinking and explaining your ideas clearly 
• Showing little emotion 

Writing, at times, feels like schizophrenia. You've got a million voices telling you what to write and what to do. It's impossible to concentrate on any one thing. You react abnormally to a social situation because you're thinking about how your character would react in that situation instead. When you lay down to sleep, your mind runs full speed ahead. You're distanced from the world, alone in your fictional one, and yet when you sit down to write, you have trouble communicating your ideas clearly.

Sometimes it's so easy to get caught up in the haphazard world of writing and surrender ourselves to it. But it's important to recognize that this is the life of a writer. As a writer, you seek the story in your head in its entirety. You want that little voice to become a loud, obnoxious voice clamoring for escape until it emerges, like Athena from Zeus' head: fully grown and authoritative. And a writer won't stop until it is. Because only that can silence the voice.

~I.E.

Having the Guts to Write

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” 
― Sylvia Plath


I think it's every author's fear that they aspire to be great and merely turn out mediocre--or even a complete flop. It's my strong belief that one of the ways a writer does not live up to their potential is because they are afraid to push the envelope. 

They're afraid to really write.

The beautiful (and terrifying) thing about writing is that it reveals an author's deepest thoughts. 

As an introvert, when I started writing I thought it was something embarrassing, something to keep to myself, something that I could not be proud of. It's taken me several years to wrestle with this idea that writing is an art which I can fine-tune, which I can practice and which improves most when shared with others. I've been forced to come out of my shell, accept my thoughts, and share them with others.

Sharing your work is a major part of writing. 

Even if you have no publication aspirations, sharing your writing will give you an opportunity to grow and to learn from the reader.

I'm part of an online forum where I share my writing. When I decided to get serious about my craft, stumbling upon this forum was one of the biggest blessings in my life. It not only gave me an outsider's view, another opinion, but it created confidence in me. Other non-biased writers are some of the best places to give and receive feedback from. Even when they did not love what I'd written, there was value in the feedback I received.

Writers take away different things from a book than what a typical reader absorbs. 

Once I took my writing seriously, I know my criticism of other writers intensified. I had always been critical of books, and it's a running joke in my book clubs that I cannot find a book I love. (Although this isn't true--I swear!) But in my forum of writers, I am allowed to be critical. I can tear their writing apart (kindly), knowing that my intention is to help them improve as a writer and to buff and shine their work-in-progress until it glows and I am jealous of what they've written (if I'm not already). And I can be confident that they are doing the exact same to my work.

Other writers have an ability to be honest about the quality of writing that most readers lack. Not to say that getting a non-writer's opinion is not valuable--by all means, it is extremely valuable, since they will be the majority of people reading your book. But a reader tends to take away a general impression, one which removes overall themes and feelings from the book without being able to discern why they love or hate the book. 

A writer, on the other hand, is usually able to pinpoint exactly what makes them feel a specific way in a piece of writing, as well as offering solutions to fix the sentence or piece as a whole. This is invaluable insight into your writing. Insight which you, as the author, are too close to your work to see. 

There comes a time when one must get over their fear of sharing and fear of rejection and share their writing with others. 

Share it in a safe place first. Let your confidence be buoyed--but be realistic about praise if you share only with friends and family who will probably tell you your work is the best they've ever read. Recognize that sharing with a stranger, like in an online forum or a writer's group, can be much more valuable in terms of honesty. And honesty promotes growth.

What it really comes down to is stuffing down your fear and putting yourself out there. 

Take baby steps if you have to, sharing a paragraph or sentence or simply a story idea. Then share more, and share it with a wider range of people. Don't allow yourself to get comfortable in your writing. 

Comfort is the death of growth.

Writers should never stop growing. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be a writer whose first work was just as good as her last. I want to constantly improve, constantly make my writing more valuable, more interesting and more thought-provoking than the last. 

I don't want to remain a static writer. I want to be willing to change, when change is necessary and vital. 

I want to be a writer with the guts to push the envelope.

Just bleed

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. *

Ernest Hemingway.


Exactly how I'm feeling of late.