A Quote by Emma Donoghue
I'm really not one of these procrastinators who cleans the house in order to put off writing, but life gets in the way.
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Jeff Bodine was saying that when he gets depressed, that he cleans house.
For me, the writing life doesn't just happen when I sit at the writing desk. It is a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this: that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in. 'My heart keeps open house,' was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem. And rendering in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world.
The essence is that many procrastinators are "structured procrastinators," people who, like me, get a lot done as a way of not working on what they should ideally be working on.
Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren't.
My lifting routine is designed to develop and maintain explosive strength off the block, so it mainly includes cleans, power cleans, jerks and snatches.
I think any start has to be a false start because really there’s no way to start. You just have to force yourself to sit down and turn off the quality censor. And you have to keep the censor off, or you start second-guessing every other sentence. Sometimes the suspicion of a possible false start comes through, and you have to suppress it to keep writing. But it gets more persistent. And the moment you know it’s really a false start is when you start … it’s hard to put into words.
All the pins stuck in my head from the wig. I would set off a metal detector. And you know when your head gets really itchy? So when the wig gets put on at like 5:30, 6 A.M., and you can't take it off until 7 P.M. - I won't miss all the pins scratching against my scalp.
The rest-seeking procrastinators would generally rather not exert themselves at all, while the fun-task procrastinators enjoy being busy and active all the time but have a hard time starting things that are not so amusing.
It’s amazing how quickly something gets written. Now, when it comes, it can be on a bus, or in a store. I’ve stopped in Macy’s and written on a dry-goods counter and then suddenly had a whole piece of writing for myself that was accomplished, where earlier in my life I felt I had to spend a week in a house somewhere in the country in order to get that. Conditions change.
It really was... my life was not my own, put it that way. It was fun, I was only 19 at the time but it was crazy, it was really, really crazy and people camped outside my parents' house and it was a nutty time, really crazy and I'm glad I don't have that right now.
At a certain point, if you still have your marbles and are not faced with serious financial challenges, you have a chance to put your house in order. It's a cliche, but it's underestimated as an analgesic on all levels. Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable.
What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
I put a lot into my body on and off the field that really gets me ready for the next day.
I put off writing the first Left Behind book for a year because I got invited to assist Billy Graham in his memoirs, and had we known what we were putting off for a year, we might not have put it off.
The house has to be clean and in order because I have to be able to sift through the creative disorder in my mind. The mental disorder that I'm exploring has to bounce off the walls. It has to go in and out of different rooms. If the room is not in order, then I can't distinguish which is which, and that really drives me crazy.
Life sometimes gets in the way of writing.
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