CAPTAIN BACKFIRE!

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

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—	Anais Nin (via theskrimmer)

brain-food:

On June 26, 1956, author C.S. Lewis responded to a fan letter from Joan Lancaster, a young Chronicles of Narnia enthusiast.

In a personalized thank-you letter, the writer imparted some simple and valuable stylistic advice for budding prose writers.

misnomer-:

write upset, stressed, irrationally

edit calm, composed, level headed

Maybe I wanted to learn how to think. Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking.

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—	Don DeLillo, in an interview with The Paris Review (via theskrimmer)

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.

Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view’.

There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.

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—	A bit of writing advice from Neil Gaiman but also just life advice (via drinkyourjuice)

vulpecula:

Last line of Sylvia Plath’s You Ask Me Why I Spend My Life Writing.

Frederick Buechner on writing »

“I wish that I had told my writing students to give some thought to what they wanted their books to make happen inside the people who read them, and I also wish that I had told them what Red Smith said about writing although I suppose it is possible that he hadn’t gotten around to saying it yet… . What Red Smith said was more or less this: “Writing is really quite simple; all you have to do is sit down at your typewriter and open a vein”—another haematological image. From the writer’s vein into the reader’s vein: for better or worse a transfusion.

I couldn’t agree with Red Smith more. For my money anyway, the only books worth reading are books written in blood… .

Write about what you really care about is what he is saying. Write about what truly matters to you—not just things to catch the eye of the world but things to touch the quick of the world the way they have touched you to the quick, which is why you are writing about them. Write not just with wit and eloquence and style and relevance but with passion. Then the things that your books make happen will be things worth happening—things that make people who read them a little more passionate themselves for their pains, by which I mean a little more alive, a little wiser, a little more beautiful, a little more open and understanding, in short a little more human. I believe that those are the best things that books can make happen to people, and we could all make a list of the particular books that have made them happen to us.”

— Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life

Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost.

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—	Nicole Krauss (via katelizabeth) YES. (via themorninglight)

Writing is a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.

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—	Graham Greene (via kari-shma) (via dorkysays) (via itchycosmicpocket)