A Quote by DeRay Mckesson
I wasn't a very good writer before college. I don't think I was a very good reader.
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When I went off to college, I was expecting to be a concert musician. In music school I heard all of these kids who were just unbelievable. And I understand that you can be very, very good, but there's something that separates very, very good from great, and I knew that I wasn't great.
When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasn't very good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.
To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.
As soon as I start to write I'm very aware, I'm trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I'm writing - and I think that this is important for all writers - I'm trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth. I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I'll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.
I think writing and reading are completely synergistic; not necessarily in that one has to be a good reader to be a good writer or vice versa, but that they so inform each other.
Whether you do stand-up comedy or write a story, you have a duty to deliver. As a comedian, you walk out on stage, and you have a minute to hook them, or they'll start booing. As a writer, it's very similar. A reader doesn't have time to say, 'I'll give him 50 pages, as it's not very good yet, but I hope it'll get better.'
I'm not a fan of musicals at all, but I do think 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' is a very good. I always thought 'Walk the Line' was very good, too. I was in 'Nowhere Boy.' I played Paul McCartney. That was kind of musical - we did songs in that.
I think of myself primarily as a reader, then also a writer, but that's more or less irrelevant. I think I'm a good reader, I'm a good reader in many languages, especially in English, since poetry came to me through the English language, initially through my father's love of Swinburn, of Tennyson, and also of Keats, Shelley and so on - not through my native tongue, not through Spanish. It came to me as a kind of spell. I didn't understand it, but I felt it.
Although I write screenplays, I don't think I'm a very good writer. I'm very interested in studying cultures and social issues, but as an academic I don't think I would have been too successful.
You have to be an extremely good reader to appreciate what a good writer is. There are some people who are completely insensitive to good writing.
How does it happen that a writer who's not even very good - and I can say that, I've read four or five of his books - gets to be in charge of the world's destiny? Or of the entire universe's?" If he's not very good, why didn't you stop at one?" Mrs. Tassenbaum smiled. "Touché. He is readable, I'll give him that - tells a good story.
a good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in.
I'm not a good writer, and I don't care. Unfortunately, after I left college, I didn't have time much for literature. I wish I did. Most of the time I read documents, and that's not going to help your writing. But I'm a very logical writer, and you can't get out of me. Once I've nailed you, you're finished.
How often I have tried to tell writing students that the first thing a writer must do is love the reader and wish the reader well. The writer must trust the reader to be at least as intelligent as he is. Only in such well wishing and trust, only when the writer feels he is writing a letter to a good friend, only then will the magic happen.
Make this decision today. Will you be a good and honest writer, or would you rather be famous, loved, noticed? Tell me, because there are different paths for these two divergent goals. The decision to be a true artist is lonelier and slower, but it will lead to better work and, I think, a better life. Very rarely you will be a good and honest writer and also know a little comfort and some attention and the well wishes of a crowd. This is very rare.
I think we have very good facilities for the youth in Holland. We have very good youth coaches and I think that is some of the reasons that always Holland has very good football players.
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