A Quote by Janette Turner Hospital

It often seems to me that the biggest single issue for a writer is how to stay buoyant enough to go on writing. How not to drown. — © Janette Turner Hospital
It often seems to me that the biggest single issue for a writer is how to stay buoyant enough to go on writing. How not to drown.
That's always the biggest surprise when people meet me: how buoyant I am and how fun and light I am.
It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.
The thing that's interesting as you get older as an artist is that the biggest challenge seems to be: how do you stay relevant?
When I'm writing the book I'm laughing at just how overblown the characters seemed. How full of himself he seems. But I didn't get far enough in the series to really drive the joke of it home.
It seems to me that one thing people do over and over again is try to figure out how to get married, stay married, fall in love, how to rekindle all this stuff. It seems to me to be a pretty eternal theme so I don't know if you can get typecast from making movies about men relating to women. It seems to be what is going on on the planet a lot.
I haven’t had trouble with writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, clichéd writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn’t have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments. It seems writer’s block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for writing better to happen.
How to read writers on writing: With respect, amusement, and skepticism. They will contradict one another-as they should-for each writer brings an individual history to the writing task. There is no single theology here.
How do you go on knowing that you will never again - not ever, ever - see the person you have loved? How do you survive a single hour, a single minute, a single second of that knowledge? How do you hold yourself together?
Zen taught me how to pay attention, how to delve, how to question and enter, how to stay with -- or at least want to try to stay with -- whatever is going on.
So far, the biggest regret I have in regards to the world of 'Red Queen' is that I didn't get to world-build enough. I don't think I did enough work explaining how the world came to be, and while I'm planning to go more into it, I'm a greedy writer, and I'm always going to wish I had more room to delve into the complexities of a fantasy realm.
Once I discovered how important writing music was to me and just what a huge weight it lifted off of me, I knew that it was going to be the biggest part of my life, the biggest love of my life, the biggest thing in my life.
Believe it or not, I supported Richard Nixon on the issue of presidential privilege. How could anyone conceive of being the president of the United States and think that every single thing that you say or do can become a part of the public record? It just seems so stupid to me.
Sometimes you go for weeks without writing successfully, and you don't feel like a writer anymore. When friends ask me how my week was or how I'm doing, I think back on it, and I've just been by myself. Like, I'm just a sketch.
I have spent a lot of time studying the issue of relationships, how I grew up, my parents' influence on me. I've talked to a therapist,; I've looked inward spiritually at myself, and what it seems to come down to is that I'm a Sagittarius. Please don't make me reveal more than that. It's tough enough as it is.
After 20 years of writing academic prose and lectures, it seems very familiar and straightforward to me. Writing a novel for the first time, I was reminded of just how difficult it is to figure out how to get this stuff done when you don't really know what you're doing.
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.
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