A Quote by Roland Barthes
Take the gesture, the action of writing. I have an almost obsessive relation to writing instruments. I often switch from one pen to another just for the pleasure of it. I try out new ones. I have far too many pens - I don't know what to do with all of them! And yet, as soon as I see a new one, I start craving it. I cannot keep myself from buying them.
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I'm just writing, writing, writing. I keep these tablets on me until I'm inspired to go back in and make the music. I never take a break from my pen, because I pride myself on that.
Buy less. Choose well. Make it last. Quality, not quantity. Everybody’s buying far too many clothesI mean, I know I’m lucky, I can just take things and borrow them and I’m just okay, but I hate having too many clothes. And I think that poor people should be even more careful. It doesn't mean therefore you have to just buy anything cheap. Instead of buying six things, buy one thing that you really like. Don't keep buying just for the sake of it.
I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.
The actual writing time is a lot shorter than the thinking time. I don't do too many notes. I keep it mostly in my head. I usually start writing a new book around January, and it's due October 1.
I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.
I remember, when I was a child and wrote poems in little clasped books, I used to kiss the books and put them away tenderly because I had been happy near them, and take them out by turns when I was going from home, to cheer them by the change of air and the pleasure of the new place. This, not for the sake of the verses written in them, and not for the sake of writing more verses in them, but from pure gratitude.
I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.
I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.
I realized you might make money at writing, and you might even make a living at it. So after that I didn't write stories just for the class but wrote them for the purpose of submitting them somewhere, and at some point in the process, I began writing them just to please myself and that's where you begin to see the real value of a life of writing.
I try consciously to keep myself entertained and challenged to not repeat myself at all. Like, when I start a new book, my goal is to pretty much throw out what I've done and try something completely different that I think initially I cannot do.
If I'm not writing, I can download a newer album everybody's making a fuss about. But when I'm writing, I keep myself in my own zone - I worry about listening to new music that'll inform me too much. I'm the kind of person who goes to another country and starts speaking in an accent after three days.
I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go.
Sometimes a god comes.... He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.
If you are going to be successful, you have to start hanging out with the successful people. You need to ask them to share their success strategies with you. Then try them on and see if they fit for you. Experiment with doing what they do, reading what they read, thinking the way they think, and so on. If the new ways of thinking and behaving work, adopt them. If not, drop them, and keep looking and experimenting.
I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and go with the moment and go with my guts.
With my students I give them lots and lots of guided writing. Part of it is as simple as writing a lot but not toward anything. The mind floats. Then I help them see where the language has heat. If we do this a lot in class, students eventually relax into this writing practice and enjoy it. Even just that - writing pleasure without the anxiety of "audience" or "grade" or "success" - is a kind of impetus toward the unfamiliar.
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