A Quote by Heather Sellers
Writing is making a mess, and then working and reworking to create a beautiful piece.
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Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback, and the iterative process - reworking, reworking, and reworking again until a flawed story finds its through line or a hollow character finds its soul.
If you're writing a piece for the Boston Pops, the balance is towards one end. If you're writing a piece for a chamber music society, then it's towards another point. I won't make a final answer on that. I think it changes with every piece.
A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.
2021 is my 40th year working in the industry and I can't think of a better way to celebrate than directing 'Holding.' It's a beautiful piece of writing with a great story and fantastic, full-bodied characters.
When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back.
I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.
Anytime you create art, you create a mess. I mean, 'Hamlet' is a mess!
Working with artists and other poets has made me aware that there was a bigger "me" that I hadn't been quite aware of. Plus we had a good time. It's so much fun to write, for example, with a big brush on a giant piece of paper and to help create visually attractive and surprising objects, which is not what you normally do when you're writing a poem. It's wonderful to create these pieces with artists.
I don't want to indulge myself in the luxury of writing beautiful paragraphs just for the sake of making beautiful writing. That doesn't interest me. I want everything to be essential.
I'm big on reworking vintage. Also, buying one great piece that lasts forever - to me, that is total sustainability.
I can't decide for you whether or not you have got to write, but if anything in the world, war, or pestilence, or famine, or private hunger, or anything, can stop you from writing, then don't write . . . because if anything can even begin to keep you from writing you aren't a writer and you'll be in a hell of a mess until you find out. If you are a writer, you'll still be in a hell of a mess, but you'll have better reasons.
Before I started working on a computer, writing a piece would be like making something up every day, taking the material and never quite knowing where you were going to go next with the material. With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it.
If someone stands in front of one of my paintings and says, 'This is just a mess', the word 'just' is not so good, but 'mess' might be right. Why not a mess? If it makes you say, 'Wow, I've never seen anything like that', that's beautiful.
I don't listen to music when I'm writing, but I often do when I'm reworking, editing or when I need to relax.
But in the end, mastery involves working and working and showing little improvement, perhaps with a few moments of flow pulling you along, then making a little progress, and then working and working on that new, slightly higher plateau again. It's grueling, to be sure. But that's not the problem; that's the solution.
I became really aware that when you're making a movie, you're making it three times. You're making it when you're writing it. You're making it when you're shooting it. And then you're remaking it again when you're editing it.
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