A Quote by David Shields

The thing I hate the most in any kind of writing is self-righteousness. Where you pretend you don't have the same kinds of flaws your subject has. — © David Shields
The thing I hate the most in any kind of writing is self-righteousness. Where you pretend you don't have the same kinds of flaws your subject has.
Self-loathing and self-worship can easily be the same thing. You hate the small sack of fluids and resentments that you are, and you would go to any length, and betray anything and anyone, to preserve it.
The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.
Any kind of run-of-the-mill flaws that are easily solved, to me, are boring. Situational flaws, for example. I like flaws that are rooted in a deep distrust in people because of a lack of love.
Writing on my own versus co-writing kind of is the exact same thing because we don't sit in the same room when we write. We're always writing alone anyway.
For godliness is not the consequence of your capacity to imitate God, but the consequence of His capacity to reproduce Himself in you; not self-righteousness, but Christ-righteousness; the righteousness which is by faith
Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.
What is the most fascinating kind of self-deception to me, and a kind that isn't necessarily unhealthy, is what Friedrich Nietzsche called "strategic self-deception." The kind of self-deception that you can engage in with your eyes wide open. You do it because you say, "There's things that I couldn't accomplish without this kind of self-deception."
Yet, after all, faith is not our righteousness. It is accounted to us in order to righteousness (Rom 4:5, GREEK), but not as righteousness; for in that case it would be a work like any other doing of man, and as such would be incompatible with the righteousness of the Son of God; the righteousness which is by faith. Faith connects us with the righteousness, and is therefore totally distinct from it. To confound the one with the other is to subvert the whole gospel of the grace of God. Our act of faith must ever be a separate thing from that which we believe.
The benefit of this kind of outlining is that you discover a story's flaws before you invest a lot of time writing the first draft, and it's almost impossible to get stuck at a difficult chapter, because you've already done the work to push through those kinds of blocks.
Self-righteousness, when you think about it, is a contra-indicator of self-esteem. It's what sets in when genuine righteousness eludes us.
I don't think there are any secrets to writing in the - everybody has their own techniques. You must be widely read, that's one thing, because you have to resolve a tremendous amount of background information. Also, you should know what the competition is writing, just so you're not wasting your time doing the same thing. Unless you do it better, of course.
Fiction always reveals a lot about the person who is writing it. That's the scary thing. Not in a straightforward autobiographical sense. But the flaws in a piece of fiction are, unhappily, so often also the flaws of the writer.
I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil. I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow.
He who thinks he can have flesh and bones without being subject to any external influence, or any accidents of matter, unconsciously wishes to reconcile two opposites, viz., to be at the same time subject and not subject to change. If man were never subject to change there could be no generation; there would be one single being, but no individuals forming a species.
Love me or hate me, it's one or the other. Always has been. Hate my game, my swagger. Hate my fadeaway, my hunger. Hate that I'm a veteran. A champion. Hate that. Hate it with all your heart. And hate that I'm loved, for the exact same reasons.
I put my flaws on front street. So the world accepted my flaws, so I don't have any flaws.
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