Tag overview for: 'writing'

Entries on this site with 'writing'

  • Floriography
    Of the two-dozen stories I penned while in my Ficly frenzy of Aught-Nine, this may be the one of which I was the most pleased. I've long had a somewhat vague curiosity reg
  • The Street Sweepers
    I recently penned this short story at ficly.com, and it managed to attract some attention. It seems like a good jumping off point for me for a collection of urban fantasy
  • Me Too Me Too
    After Ryan posted (and told me) about Ficly, and how it had opened the creative floodgates for him, 1024 characters at a time, I considered joining.At first, I didn't, but
  • Stories Without End
    I recently found an outlet for creative writing, and I'm actually using it. "(Ficly)":ficly.com invites users to write 1,024-character (or less) stories. Each publi
  • A Short Scene From SFO
    (Something I jotted down while waiting for a flight to Reno, with some later editing.) A pale young woman with auburn hair, a low-cut white shirt, and a careless sweater t
  • Economies of Scales
    !/images/the_lizard_king.jpg( )! . Though this book's jacket notes the author was, among other indignities, "sprayed by a bird-eating tarantula" and "ejaculated on by a Be
  • Spot. Spot Running. Running, Spot, Running.
    !/images/oscar_wao_cover_copy1.jpg( )! Ten thousand bucks for dropping subjects from sentences and not using quotation marks. I know there's more to the winner of this yea
  • Around the Block
    !/images/2008-10/writers_block.jpg( )! The worst thing about being a writer is not being able to write. I mean being physically incapable of writing. Typically, lack of ti
  • Neruda and Translation
    Now and then, I get in the mood to read poetry. It doesn't happen frequently, and my knowledge of poetry is minimal, so I definitely can't claim to be an expert or even an

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QUOTES

Humility in the wrong place

"What we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed....

...the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."

–G.K. Chesterton, from Orthodoxy

Make No Little Plans

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans. Aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us."
–Daniel Burnham, architect of Chicago, quoted in Charles Moore, Daniel H. Burnham: Planner of Cities, II:147. (via Christ is Deeper Still)

Borges on Short Stories


“It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.”
–Jorge Luis Borges, from the preface to Ficciones

Strickler on Top Ten Lists

See full post for Yancey Strickler’s 2005 taxonomy of top ten music lists, as cited here.

Berry on Writing Poetry


“Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.”
–Wendell Berry, from How to be a Poet

Twain (?) on History


“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
—Attributed to Mark Twain

Lewis on God's Glory


“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”
–C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Merwin on Writing


“I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write”
—W.S. Merwin, Opening the Hand