Day Six, continued!

Dr Seuss quote to help you be a better writer. 🙂

It has often been said
there’s so much to be read,
you never can cram
all those words in your head.

So the writer who breeds
more words than he needs
is making a chore
for the reader who reads.

That’s why my belief is
the briefer the brief is,
the greater the sigh
of the reader’s relief is.

I was totally spying on people. All day long. It was very productive and I found out a lot of things. Probably about you. And now I’m going to write them all down for my next novel. And perhaps memoir.

Lance Larsen came and spoke to my class and it was wonderful. He gave six tips for creativity. The first one is to READ. To read and read and read and read and read. Not just in your genre, not just in your discipline, but to read widely. To let yourself see what others have done, to open up to possibilities you could never have imagined.

Here is a quote by Saul Bellow:

“A writer is a reader moved to emulation.” 

What do you think of this quote? Lance talked about how some people are worried they will end up copying others so they don’t read anything and thus they don’t change, they don’t push themselves, they don’t get to see anything new. 

Do you agree? Disagree? If you are marathon burned out, pick up a new book. A different book.  A mystery (if you don’t read mysteries), a classic (if it’s been years), a stack of picture books (if you don’t have small children) and read something. See if it sparks an idea. 

I’ll tell you another tip later. I hope you are all having happy writing days. I am doing the best I can and making some headway. Some. And I’m glad for that.

xoxo

Oh and one more quote from Saul Bellow:

“One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.”

Ummmmmmmm

Day Six!

Can you believe it? We’re on day six. Not having to write 2500 words a day makes this a much easier marathon. Is it a much more successful one for you? I hope so. 🙂

I packed almost all day yesterday so got very little writing done.

I will pack and write today. I think I am going to try 30 on/ 30 off. Minutes, I mean. I’ll let you know what happens.

Today, for our blog, I will post great quotes.

And maybe an exercise or two.

Here’s Eudora Welty, who once told my creative writing teacher that she would read my work. Crazy, huh? I was 16 or 17 at the time and madly in love with Welty’s writing. Anyway, she’s a favorite of mine. But even crazier than that–my teacher got to meet her!

“Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn’t hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn’t my mother’s voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers–to read as listeners–and with all writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don’t know. By now I don’t know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.”

What about when you work? Is someone telling you the story? Do you see it unwind before your brain like a movie? What’s your experience?