Amongst a plethora of new books at Christmas, I received a particularly beautiful one, Being A Writer. When I returned to work after the break, I chose it as my reading choice for the tube and I veritably flew through its pages. Its contents are arranged into five sections:
Becoming A Writer
Methods and Means
Failing
The Art of Writing
A Sense of An Ending
and include pages and pages of opinions and advice from a hugely disparate number of writers: fiction writers, non-fiction writers, contemporary writers, defunct writers, popular writers, literary writers, screenwriters, short story writers, black writers, Caucasian writers, Asian writers, male and female, young and old.
The result is a volume that I did find compelling although, in places, it is also contradictory. There are authors who are quite prescriptive in their love for writing in the silence of the night, while others are quite dismissive of those who do so and make a strong argument for writing almost as a '9-to-5' office-like activity. Just about all though have a non-negotiable message: inspiration is for amateurs. A pro writer sits down at the screen [paper/typewriter] no matter what, and especially in the face of 'lack of inspiration'. Here is a selection for your perusal, after which I would say you really must go out and buy the book.
Read over your composition and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson
People say, 'What do you have for people who want to be writers?' I say, they don't really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they're gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut for it, they know it.
R.L. Stine
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
E. L. Doctorow
Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all.
Charles Bukowski
Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.
Richard Ford
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I know, it's been a very long time since I've written anything. Yes, not since I've posted anything but, actually, since I've written anything. Over the past two years my life changed quite a lot and while I would love to be one of those people who finds refuge in her art while the seas are rough, the reality is... I just am not. And with each day that passes, thinking about writing is not writing, and the more I think about writing and the harder it gets to set fingers to keyboard again. But it is well known that one of the world's most powerful forces is inertia. Tonight, I decided to push through and, boy, is it hard. A part of me just wants to delete this whole lot and tell myself I'll start again tomorrow. Except tomorrow never comes. But it came today. And I don't care how much of a lightweight this is, it stays, so that I am closing the gap that opened at the end of 2016.
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