Notes on Reading and Writing #6

She thinks about her favorite Shirley Jackson quote: “As long as you write it away regularly, nothing can really hurt you.” This had always worked for her. Get hurt. Write your way through it. Death. Heartache. General malaise. Politics. First-world problems. Arguments with store clerks. Highway stress. Fears. Kid problems. Write and you shall be free. Write and the most unmanageable becomes manageable. She knows she should write about Dax and GDOG and the shed and the tree and the dolls and the hair. She knows she should climb those stairs and face the page. “Go up,” she says, but good gracious, she just can’t.

~ Kristin Bair O’Keeffe , Agatha Arch is Afraid of Everything

Notes on Reading and Writing #5

One night the library started closing just as he reached the passage in Emma when it seems like Mr. Knightley is going to marry Harriet, and he had to close the book and walk home in a state of strange emotional agitation. He’s amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it ‘the pleasure of being touched by great art’. In those words it almost sounds sexual. And in a way, the feeling provoked in Connell when Mr. Knightley kisses Emma’s hand is not completely asexual, though its relation to sexuality is indirect. It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.

~Sally Rooney, Normal People

Notes on Reading and Writing #4

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

~Jack Kerouac

Notes on Reading and Writing #3

…I analyzed stories. For the first time I realized that professional creative writing is the only craft that must be practiced in silence and solitude. No happy chattering. No begging matches. I was alone. I had never known such loneliness, surrounded by an avalanche of crumpled yellow paper only good enough to end up on the floor.

~Margaret Craven, Again Calls the Owl

Notes on Reading and Writing #2

It is strange when a professional creative writer turns out a story that becomes so successful. It is not the critics who let him know. It is the readers.

~Margaret Craven, Again Calls the Owl