Reading is one of my favourite things. OF COURSE! That’s why I am a writer. Finding little stories online that are interesting is not difficult but sometimes, a few catch your eye. This one did it for me.
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25 Things Every Writer Should Know
I found this very hilarious and true. Basic things all writers MUST know.
10 Things Teenage Writers Should Know About Writing
Dear Teenage Writers:
Hi there. I was once a teenage writer like you (see goofy picture to the right), although that was so long ago that between now and then, I could have been a teenager all over again. Nevertheless, recently I’ve been thinking about offering some thoughts and advice on being a teenage writer, based on my own experiences of being one, and on my experiences of being a teenage writer who kept being a writer when he grew up. So here are some of those thoughts, for your consideration.
I’m going to talk to you about writing as straight as I can; there’s a possibility that some of what I say to you might come off as abrupt and condescending. I apologize in advance for that, but you should know that I sometimes come off as abrupt and condescending toward everyone, i.e., it’s not just you. Also, I…
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What happens if you fall in love with a writer?
Lots of things might happen. That’s the thing about writers. They’re unpredictable. They might bring you eggs in bed for breakfast, or they might all but ignore you for days. They might bring you eggs in bed at three in the morning. Or they might wake you up for sex at three in the morning. Or make love at four in the afternoon. They might not sleep at all. Or they might sleep right through the alarm and forget to get you up for work. Or call you home from work to kill a spider. Or refuse to speak to you after finding out you’ve never seen To Kill A Mockingbird. Or spend the last of the rent money on five kinds of soap. Or sell your textbooks for cash halfway through the semester. Or leave you love notes in your pockets. Or wash you pants with Post-It notes in the pockets so your laundry comes out covered in bits of wet paper. They might cry if the Post-It notes are unread all over your pants. It’s an unpredictable life.
But what happens if a writer falls in love with you?
This is a little more predictable. You will find your hemp necklace with the glass mushroom pendant around the neck of someone at a bus stop in a short story. Your favorite shoes will mysteriously disappear, and show up in a poem. The watch you always wear, the watch you own but never wear, the fact that you’ve never worn a watch: they suddenly belong to characters you’ve never known. And yet they’re you. They’re not you; they’re someone else entirely, but they toss their hair like you. They use the same colloquialisms as you. They scratch their nose when they lie like you. Sometimes they will be narrators; sometimes protagonists, sometimes villains. Sometimes they will be nobodies, an unimportant, static prop. This might amuse you at first. Or confuse you. You might be bewildered when books turn into mirrors. You might try to see yourself how your beloved writer sees you when you read a poem about someone who has your middle name or prose about someone who has never seen To Kill A Mockingbird. These poems and novels and short stories, they will scatter into the wind. You will wonder if you’re wandering through the pages of some story you’ve never even read. There’s no way to know. And no way to erase it. Even if you leave, a part of you will always be left behind.
If a writer falls in love with you, you can never die.
Awesome quotes from awesome writers, Part II
“The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, WD
“When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.”
—Stephen King, WD
“Genius gives birth, talent delivers. What Rembrandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they’re seeing now, what we’ll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.”
–Jack Kerouac, WD
“Long patience and application saturated with your heart’s blood—you will either write or you will not—and the only way to find out whether you will or not is to try.”
—Jim Tully, WD
“All stories have to at least try to explain some small portion of the meaning of life. You can do that in 20 minutes, and 15 inches. I still remember a piece that the great Barry Bearak did in The Miami Herald some 30 years ago. It was a nothing story, really: Some high school kid was leading a campaign to ban books he found offensive from the school library. Bearak didn’t even have an interview with the kid, who was ducking him. The story was short, mostly about the issue. But Bearak had a fact that he withheld until the kicker. The fact put the whole story, subtly, in complete perspective. The kicker noted the true, wonderful fact that the kid was not in school that day because “his ulcer was acting up.” Meaning of life, 15 inches.”
—Gene Weingarten, WD
“Beware of advice—even this.”
—Carl Sandburg, WD
“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”
—Harper Lee, WD
“I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that’s the job of art.”
—Andre Dubus III, WD (this quote is from an interview with Dubus in our July/August 2012 issue)
“Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it’s that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through—originality.”
—Jack Kerouac, WD
“People say, ‘What advice 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 out for it, they know it.”
—R.L. Stine, WD (this quote is from an interview with Stine that ran in our November/December 2011 issue)
“I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD
“Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD
“Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD
“Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD
“I don’t believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.”
—Ray Bradbury, WD
“It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
—Ernest Hemingway
“Writers are always selling somebody out.”
—Joan Didion
“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”
—Robert A. Heinlein
“Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk—away from any open flames—to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.”
—George Singleton
“There is only one plot—things are not what they seem.”
—Jim Thompson
“Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at 15 to write several novels.”
—May Sarton
“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.”
—William Carlos Williams
“The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.”
—Andre Gide
“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
—Virginia Woolf
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
—Elmore Leonard
“You do not have to explain every single drop of water contained in a rain barrel. You have to explain one drop—H2O. The reader will get it.”
—George Singleton
“When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.”
—Margaret Laurence
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
—Mark Twain
“I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind.”
—Patrick Dennis
“Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.”
—Annie Dillard
“A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.”
—Angela Carter
“I almost always urge people to write in the first person. … Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.”
—William Zinsser
“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.”
—Ernest Hemingway
“Write while the heat is in you. … The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.”
—Henry David Thoreau
“You don’t actually have to write anything until you’ve thought it out. This is an enormous relief, and you can sit there searching for the point at which the story becomes a toboggan and starts to slide.”
—Marie de Nervaud, WD
“Whether a character in your novel is full of choler, bile, phlegm, blood or plain old buffalo chips, the fire of life is in there, too, as long as that character lives.”
—James Alexander Thom
“Writers live twice.”
—Natalie Goldberg
Awesome quotes from awesome writers, Part I
“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”
—Philip Roth
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
—Stephen King
“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.”
—Enid Bagnold
“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.”
—Allen Ginsberg, WD
“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.”
—William S. Burroughs
“All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.”
—Steve Almond, WD
“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
—George Orwell
“It ain’t whatcha write, it’s the way atcha write it.”
—Jack Kerouac, WD
“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.”
—Hunter S. Thompson
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
—George Orwell
“I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.”
—Roald Dahl, WD
“The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.”
—Robert Benchley
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
—Ernest Hemingway
“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”
—Virginia Woolf
“Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it’s work. … Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.”
—Stephen King, WD (this quote is from an interview with King in our May/June 2009 issue)
“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”
—Peter Handke
“To defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.”
—William Zinsser, WD
“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.”
—William Faulkner
“For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen
“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. … I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.”
—Gore Vidal
“We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.”
—John Updike, WD
“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”
—Samuel Johnson
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.”
—Elmore Leonard
“Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.”
—Larry L. King, WD
“Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces.”
—Allegra Goodman
“I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.”
—Richard Ben Cramer
“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.”
—Doris Lessing
“Style means the right word. The rest matters little.”
—Jules Renard
“Style is to forget all styles.”
—Jules Renard
“I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.”
—Tom Clancy, WD
“The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.”
—Eudora Welty, WD
“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.”
—Lawrence Block, WD
“Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.”
—Leslie Gordon Barnard, WD
“If you tell the reader that Bull Beezley is a brutal-faced, loose-lipped bully, with snake’s blood in his veins, the reader’s reaction may be, ‘Oh, yeah!’ But if you show the reader Bull Beezley raking the bloodied flanks of his weary, sweat-encrusted pony, and flogging the tottering, red-eyed animal with a quirt, or have him booting in the protruding ribs of a starved mongrel and, boy, the reader believes!”
—Fred East, WD
“Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s Plot.”
—Leigh Brackett, WD
See him leave
I wasn’t ready to see him go. Not when I had started loving him like an open window, not right in front of my eyes. It was like he was slipping through my fingers and all I could do was watch.
My heart shattered a little more with every word he said because it felt like he was throwing ice blades at me. The coldness in his eyes made me shiver but it was contagious, I felt my soul losing the heat from his love and it left me whimpering.
My shield had been left behind a while ago so I was defenseless from his attacks. He had the patience to aim for the spots that would hurt me more but leaving me to bleed out wasn’t enough so he re-opened old wounds.
With his bare hands, the ones that once held me loving and delicate, he shoved my own heart that I had given him in my face. By that time I was almost gone, but a part of me still held hope and I was willing to fight a little longer.
I was trying to convince myself that he didn’t mean to hurt me, that he was just having a hard time and I should endure it with him because, after all, he had stuck with me through my darkest times.
But then he was washing my blood off his hands and all I could think about was that I should apologize for the mess… Right there I realized that something was wrong.
He left me without looking back. It took me some time to pick myself up but eventually I did. I cleaned the mess to get rid of any traces of what happened. I was still destroyed but time healed my wounds and with the love of my family and friends I stitched myself up.
And then I learnt a valuable lesson: scars will remain when everything else is gone but if you can love yourself properly those scars will not matter.
Early morning thoughts
It’s late and I should be sleeping but lately I can’t close my eyes anytime before 3am; which sucks because I wake up tired and moody. So, right now I’m having an anxiety attack and need to get some thoughts out of my mind before it drives me insane. I’m tired and my brain refuses to focus on one idea, so it’s going to be mainly rambling nonsense paragraphs about one out of many emotions I’m getting.
I don’t think I’ll ever be completely happy. I am the problem, I know, because no matter how good things are and how promising the future looks, I always go drown myself in the negative side of everything. It’s because I’m scared of giving myself into happiness and then have it taken from me. One chooses to be happy, that I know, and doesn’t let things affect it, but I can’t seem to choose it because I’m a coward. I guess it’s just easier to never expect anything and that way you won’t be disappointed. I know that there are things, great things, that I’m missing because I’m afraid to let go. I can’t let go of sadness because it’s what I’m familiar with, meaning my past was sad and I can’t get away from it.
When I think about everything I’ve gone through, it doesn’t hurt anymore. I don’t cry about it or allow myself too much self-pity. That’s a nice achievement and I’m proud of it. I forgave and forgot. It feels amazing! I was bitter for so long because of things from my past and people who had hurt me… I wasn’t enjoying life. I’m proud to have gotten over that.
But of course that my past did leave scars. Trust issues, mainly, but also cynicism and scepticism. I’m afraid of too many things and careless or reckless about many others. Anyway, I appreciate every little thing that made me who I am. I don’t regret anything. I can’t change what happened but I am trying to make the best of it and turn it into life lessons that only make me better. Somehow, it took me a long time to understand that regret isn’t worth anything. Also, it took me almost three years to understand that none of what happened was my fault; I was directly affected by the decisions of adults that were supposed to take care of me, make me feel safe and stable. Letting go of that guilt was a huge step but it felt like having a weight taken away.
Now I can say that everything that has happened in my life made me self-aware. I got in touch with a part of me that was hidden deep down. That’s why I almost always know the reason behind the things I do; I’m honest with myself about the intentions I have when I do something. Like I know I’m used to sadness and darkness, so whenever a spark of happiness burns a little too bright, I shut it down and far away from me because I’m afraid of failing. Or maybe I’m afraid of it actually working out right and not knowing what to do from there. Yes, I know how I take advantage of situations to get what I want. I can play people and manipulate them into doing what I want. I get away with things too easily. And when I don’t get what I want, I’m angry and snapping at anyone that gets in my way. It’s scary to think about the things I would do to get what I want because sometimes the lines become blurry and I don’t know the limits myself.
I know that sometimes I want attention from people, which I consider okay. We all need it sometimes, right? I like being the centre of attention, having people watch my every move and being able to pull the strings of situations. I know that I say controversial things and share unpopular opinions to piss people off and have them argue with me about it. I love having the last word. I enjoy having people on the edge; it just seems entertaining how much I can push before they break down and burst into intense feelings like anger or tears. It’s like having a real reaction with no filters. People losing their minds over things, it’s fun to me.
As I also know that sometimes I would like to be invisible. To go through life without being noticed, just like being a ghost. That way it would be just me, no strings attached. It would all be about me and pleasing me, doing whatever I want. Because the person I am, cares too much about her beloved ones. I wouldn’t dare go missing for a weekend because of the pain it would cause to my family. I feel like they are my limits, the lines I would not cross are defined by how much I care about them. Maybe I think that because, quoting Sherlock Holmes, “sentiment is chemical defect found in the losing side.” Feelings makes us weak and vulnerable. I like that about people because it keeps our humanity alive, but then… it would save so much trouble to just don’t care about anything. All those thoughts go against the way I act, because I think love is the strongest thing in the whole universe. If we didn’t love and care, life would be easier, but empty and boring.
I’m interested in meeting people. I love getting as much information as I can about who they are, how’s their life, what they like… I love watching people when they talk or even when they’re silent and lost in their own worlds. Every little thing matters to me because then putting all of that information together makes me able to tell their strengths and their weaknesses. It’s like getting into people’s head just by the words they choose when they speak, or how their eyes convey their emotions without them really knowing. How every movement or their hands gives away even more information. This is why information equals power. I know what people want me to say and when, I know how they want me to act. Sometimes I do and some other times I don’t. Depends on what I want.
I would like to feel bad about it, because it makes me an awful person. Of course it does. But somehow I just feel proud because I care, truly, about people. Maybe not for the right reason sometimes, but I care.
I know that acting different with every person or being something that I am not makes a coward. I never show my true self or my personality to most people, my attitude depends on what they are. It’s sad to think why I do that… There are several reasons but the most important are opposite and contradictory. One is that most time people aren’t interesting enough for me to care, or I don’t consider them worthy of getting to know me. Two is that sometimes I feel worthless, like I wouldn’t be enough for people to really like me for who I am. It comes from the fact that my father never really cared about me and it made me feel like there was something wrong with me because my own father didn’t want to love me or spend time with me.
There’s a little confession I’ve been keeping to myself for a long time. I love getting to know people because it’s like a challenge. When someone catches my attention, let’s say a boy, I love the challenge of making them fall for me. I’ll start with subtle questions; the normal things you would ask to someone you are meeting. Most people love talking about themselves so they spill information like crazy. In return, I give little about myself: small, basic, not important; nothing that will leave spaces open to think deeper into it. Then, with that information, I’ll make myself just what they want. Little by little, I’ll know more about what they want and I’ll do it. It creates the illusion that they are getting to know me. That process it’s fun at its finest. After a while, they’ll find themselves wanting more of me and they’ll do things to please me; only for me to get bored in the matter of two or three months. It’s shocking that sometimes they will do anything to keep me and it’s crazy to realize how much they care about me. On some occasions, that will make me want to play along for a little more just to see how much more I can get before they have had enough. That thing about having people on the edge, yes it is fun.
Writing in order to live 