A Quote by Kathleen Norris
Poets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a discipline. The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn't. But it will be necessary to revise--to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things--in order to make it come out right.
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Write. Start writing today. Start writing right now. Don’t write it right, just write it -and then make it right later. Give yourself the mental freedom to enjoy the process, because the process of writing is a long one. Be wary of “writing rules” and advice. Do it your way.
I don't think you could teach someone to be a genius, but you can certainly teach them to not make rookie mistakes and to look at writing the way a writer looks at writing, and not just the way a reader looks at writing. There are a lot of techniques and skills that can be taught that will be helpful to anybody, no matter how gifted they are, and I think writing programs can be very good for people.
So, the process of revision, it's not systematic. But for me, I mean, I know a lot of poets who write out a draft and then revise it and I think they're happier people. But, I'm just not able to do it that way. I need to just continually examine it as I do it.
There’s a right time for everything. Not all will come to you, because there’s a solid plan. You just have to have faith, you have to believe that there’s a greater plan for us, in case it doesn’t pan out the way we thought it would. The only thing you can control is your attitude towards this things. You have to accept it and try to make the most of what is given to you.
E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.
Dialogue is really aimed at going into the whole thought process and changing the way the thought process occurs collectively. We haven't really paid much attention to thought as a process. We have engaged in thoughts, put we have only paid attention to the content, not to the process. Why does thought require attention? Everything requires attention, really. If we ran machines without paying attention to them, they would break down. Our thought, too, is a process, and it requires attention, otherwise its going to go wrong.
Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do
Your heart, my friend, is the size of a stadium. If you try to fill it with small things - a new car, a vacation, a promotion at work, a bigger home, a stock portfolio - a mournful echo will fill your life. But if you fill your stadium with all of humanity and search for ways to make their lives better each day, you will find yourself in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing in the right way.
Sometimes life is hard. Things go wrong—in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do: make good art. . . . Someone on the internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before: make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and it doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: make good art.
If your life consistently bears no fruit, God will intervene to discipline you. If your life bears some fruit, God will intervene to prune you. If your life bears a lot of fruit, God will invite you to abide more deeply with Him.
What I find is that many times when I work with chance, with indeterminacy, I am more open to experience, less prone to a fixed process, and I think it creates a very important challenge. It creates a way of writing that is, in a way, flatter or smooth, a surface conducive to release, to movement. And in this way, the form of writing gets delightfully melded with the process of the writing.
Writing teaches writing. Your writing will teach you how to write if you work hard enough and have enough faith.
I've also been writing with my guitarist, Ted Barnes, and he's amazing. Writing with him has taught me a lot about my own writing process, in the sense that it's incredably personal to write with someone else from scratch.
What will happen is the bills will start out the way we like them; in order to move them - we'll probably have to make compromises. That's the way the legislative process works when it's functioning.
Love is what makes you do everything. It really does conquer all. With my first album, I was writing about empowerment hoping that would make it true. And now it is. I'm in charge. I make the rules. I've been writing since I was nine years old and I'm very much involved in the creative process. And now that I'm in a happier place in my personal life, I'm spitting songs out left and right.
It is impossible to know what fate will bring. If you love to write or paint, you will keep on writing or painting, and things will either work out or not, and you just have to keep being in the process.
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