Fluid Imagination“It’s impossible to recognize a tipping point until it’s behind you, but I suspect that we may be able to look back and see something shift right around now…We are no longer monogamous readers, loyal to a single source; rather, we read voraciously, looking for patterns, teasing out the things that matter to us, making connections, and then (often) writing about them ourselves.” — Mandy Brown
“As literature gets smart enough to operate in a spirit of aesthetic openness and generosity, and borrows more broadly from art, philosophy, video games, microbudgeted films from Sweden and Singapore, minimalist installations, conceptual thises and thats, may its practitioners also be smart enough to look in the seldom opened cabinets out in the garage, where the ugly stepchildren stashed the treasures hoping someone would find them.” — Kyle Minor on finding appropriable lessons from “non-literary” writers
“It’s not really writing until you feel something; until you choke up at a thought, until you start fidgeting in your seat in excitement, until you feel the twinge of pain that happens when a thorn is pulled out of your side. Go back. Delete everything before you started fidgeting or crying or deflating like a balloon. Then, write some more.” — Frank Chimero
“We are not so good at developing great writers, it is true, but why is this? It is simply because we don’t need them. We still have Shakespeare. We still have Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson; their books are still around. We don’t genuinely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime.” — Bill James
“The story has to pierce the heart of the reader. A great story is always entertaining…and always relevant to life on a personal level…for the reader.” — Larry Brooks
Over at HTMLGIANT, Kyle Minor provides a list of the 137 rules for writing. #73 might be my favorite, but #115 gives it a run for its money.
“I despise the discourse that says we are all shallow, that we are all flighty, distracted, not paying attention. I am paying attention, but I am paying attention to everything, and even if my knowledge is fragmented and hard to synthesize, it is wider, and it plays in a vaster sphere, than any knowledge that has gone before.” — James Bridle