A Quote by Joyce Carol Oates
I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.
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Writing is both bomb and bomb disposal-a necessary shattering of cliche and assumption, and a powerful defusing of the soul-destroying messages of modern life (that nothing matters, nothing changes, money is everything, etc). Writing is a state of being as well as an act of doing.
When human reason has exhausted every possibility, the children can go to their Father and receive all they need. ... For only when you have become utterly dependent upon prayer and faith, only when all human possibilities have been exhausted, can you begin to reckon that God will intervene and work His miracles.
we should write because writing brings clarity and passion to the act of living. writing is sensual, experiential, grounding. we should write because writing is good for the soul. we should write because writing yields us a body of work, a felt path through the world we live in.
I started to work up in my old bedroom, playing, writing songs, and it somehow came to me that I could introduce soul music. Nobody seemed to be doing that.
I have read a thousand screenplays, and I have acted in a handful of them, and I have felt when it feels good, the writing, and it feels natural, and feels funny or sad or honest or whatever it may be. You connect. And I felt when it feels like writing, when it feels stale, or when it feels artificial or forced, or too theatrical or whatever.
The process of re-writing and writing and re-writing means that you may have a brilliant phrase, but over time it distills and distorts and changes.
Public taste changes and the aesthetic of a culture changes over time, so the idea isn't to appeal to the aesthetic of the moment and what people will like right now; the idea is to somehow keep yourself in the public memory so that as taste evolves it will eventually come to embrace your thing. So, it's about writing to be remembered rather than writing to be liked.
Writing isn't just a job that stops at six thirty... It's a mad, sexy, sad, scary, ruthless, joyful, and utterly, utterly personal thing. There's not the writer and then me; there's just me. All of my life connects to the writing. All of it.
I hate this idea that I've somehow become detached. It's like I can't win. I'd been hearing all these years that I was too hands-on: that I was the guy writing out the lineup card. Now, I'm not present enough. How is it possible to be a detached micromanager?
I have enjoyed writing songs for so long... it felt like in order to make music that I could relate to myself, I would have to be a part of the writing process.
It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.
I started off by doing everything myself, driving the truck, going to the woodshop, buying the wood, designing the furniture, cutting it out, making it myself, finishing it, polishing it, and delivering it, and writing the invoice and writing the letters, doing the books, doing the telephone bill and everything else like that.
Writing 'Hoop Roots' was a substitute or a surrogate activity. I can't play anymore - my body won't cooperate - so in the writing of the book, I was looking to tell a good story about my life and about basketball, but I was also looking to entertain myself the way that I entertain myself when I play.
And with a practice of writing comes a certain important integrity. A culture filled with bloggers thinks differently about politics or public affairs, if only because more have been forced through the discipline of showing in writing why A leads to B.
Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.
I feel like I always learn when I'm writing, even when I'm not writing about myself. I'm careful not to judge; I try to internalize and empathize with the characters. Stepping into that person's shoes is transformative. It changes you. Looking at my own life, it's also humbling to write.
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