“Writing is emblematic art form, which means that the book will never be any greater than the writer’s ability to perceive, classify, and describe the external world, think abstractedly, and organize the material that structures the content of their mind.”
“Create worlds of your choice by writing the books you want.”
“Something is wrong with a sentence when you can delete words and not sense the loss.”
“Dialogue is just two monologues clashing.”
“I like to think I’ve written something worth reading when I cry the tears of the characters.”
“Language is our identity tool and by using experience, observation, and imagination, we each discover the words that give voice to our lives. To tell our stories is the human method of perforating our isolation tanks, the means to encapsulate what we previously learned, and the mechanism that allows us to enter the universal dialogue of compassion. Sharing the pandemonium of our life’s stories full of grime, love, noise, and steeped in emotional chaos is the act that ultimately binds us to our family, friends, and community. All lovers know each other stories. Farmers, villagers, big city hobnobs, and the citizens from all nations share a conjoined thread through storytelling that seriously investigates the collective human condition.”
“Well, I like him. There’s a darkness to him. But does he make it all the way through?” She shrugged. “It’s entirely up to him.” “What do you mean?” He smiled quizzically at her. “Characters talk to you. Transform. Make choices,” she replied. “Choices,” he echoed. “Of who they become.”
“Personal essay writing is analogous to undertaking a vision quest, a potential turning point in life taken to discover intimate personal truths, form complex abstract thoughts, and ascertain the intended spiritual direction of a person’s life.”
“I ll never amount to anything—well anything my parents want, so instead I’ll end up puking and drinking till I’m blind drunk, It’s funny my mother says I hurt myself to spite her but she doesn’t know I hurt myself because I am, I am, I am a writer.”
“Human beings innate complexities resist reduction into simple sentences and neat paragraphs. The stories that come nearest to expressing the ambivalent nature of people are textured and occasionally inconsistent and express waves of inner uncertainty. A simile and a metaphor are not literally true. A figure of speech, symbols, and allegories are mere expressions that when interlinked with other text assist explain facts, ideas, and emotions. Useful facts are elusive; we must look for them, and then express them using whatever mechanism proves most authoritative. We can never directly describe emotions; we resort to metaphors to describe emotions and other illusive thoughts. Ideas by virtue of their untested nature are often untrue or at best rough approximations of truth. Lyrical writing is equivocal; it is never exactly true or precisely false. Lyrical language attempts to express and connect sentiments through extrapolation and misdirection. The writer’s task is to melt away durable facts, breakdown the symbolic depictions of solid reality, and discover the liquidity of a passionate inner life that provides the hot breath to our steamy humanness.”
“You will never learn how to write well if you don t learn how to edit.”
“I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.”
“think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.”
“Writing is a pitched battle with the elusive self, a contest that resultant celebratory jubilee demonstrates the writer’s innate capacity to meld abstract ideas with concrete forms. Writers must attempt simultaneously to juggle opposing ideas, notions, impressions, and images. They must lash out in an effort to tear apart past platitudes, while also laboring to construct new analogues to express and explain their evolving values based upon continuous interactions with reality. Writers seek to ferret out the comedic rooted in the tragic. They must learn how to laugh and cry with equal vim.”
“Writers’ never-ending quest involves investigating genuineness while carving out narrative nonfiction. They must strive to reach great truths by recounting untold lies with acute enthusiasm. Culmination of a sprawling personal saga is an attempt to flesh out from the ichors of a person’s reptilian instincts and mammalian brain patterns the epicene embodiment of the originator’s dream works intermingled with their actual remembered sensory observations. One unleashes their cache of blood-tinged memories along with an X-ray beam of reminiscent enlightenment to forge a flowing stream of self-consciousness dedicated to the task of hunting out a new way of perceiving, thinking, and communicating.”
“A person gathers all their resources to compose a foursquare philosophy for surviving each day, an engagement driving at a union of seemly inapposite associations to spotlight an androgyny of inspiration for living better. Combating self-alienation, roving after dusk without a map, unsure of the topography that lies ahead, a sincere pathfinder tentatively picks their way by using penetrating low beams and flashing wide-angle high beams. Only by continuing on the bewildering path, can we find what we seek. The writer peers into the encasement of gloom seeking out a deferential of lightness and darkness in the midst of the incongruous elements that foreshadow a person’s peripatetic quest to steer a meaningful life. By displaying the coexistence and intersection of blackened sequential realism overlaid on a snowy field of internalized temporal legend, the narrator assiduously lumbers to shed a ban of moonlight on the battered pages of their brash secular existence.”
“Unlike uplifting light fiction, narrative nonfiction’s trammeled territory provides no safe room where an unnerved writer can banish their unpleasant memories. Narrative nonfiction must make use of our sour feelings, pungent memories, gloomy thoughts, and other indigestible nougats of a black disposition. Given a choice between experiencing nothing and inconsolable grief, the writer will always take the epic grief that composes the grandeur of human tragedy. Without a mask of consolation to shunt the unseemly undercurrent that disturbs them, writers whom dabble in memoir or personal essay writing must swallow hard and make use of the entire range of their toxic temperament. The tonicity of narrative nonfiction need not be bleak, but it must be true to the full panoply of both positive and negative emotions that heave through the writer’s torrid veins.”