A Quote by Sarah Dessen

I can't sit and twiddle my thumbs. I have to start writing even if it's miserable some days. — © Sarah Dessen
I can't sit and twiddle my thumbs. I have to start writing even if it's miserable some days.
Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it. I'm 24 years old, I've got a load a money, what am I gonna do, sit at home and twiddle me thumbs? No. I'm gonna go out and 'ave it.
When my father retired, all he did was twiddle his thumbs. I don't want to go down that road. As long as I'm still in demand, I'll work.
I've been writing fiction probably since I was about 6 years old, so it's something that is second nature to me now. I just sit down and start writing. I don't sit down and start writing and it comes out perfectly - it's a process.
I like debate and argument, so I'm usually all right with disagreement, and I'm even all right if the critic doesn't come to a clear thumbs up or thumbs down. But I need the disagreement to have some kind of line I can follow on the map. I like following an interesting mind along it.
Sometimes I'll go without writing for a while and I'll start to be driven nuts. I start doubting my writing ability. So I'll sit down and a dozen songs will pop out. It's fun.
If you've got a shot at having some 30 million people give you thumbs up or thumbs down every week, you take it.
Thumbs up or thumbs down on a website is not a conversation. The danger is you get into a habit of mind where politics means giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to a website. The world is a much more complex place.
It is Israel that must recognize Palestine's rights. We cannot believe in empty statements, twiddle our thumbs and watch our children getting killed. Israel must end occupation and aggression, and our actions won't take much longer after that.
Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have "essential" and "long overdue" meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.
Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there. Does it not feel right? Keep sitting there. Think of yourself as a monk walking the path to enlightenment. Think of yourself as a high school senior wanting to be a neurosurgeon. Is it possible? Yes. Is there some shortcut? Not one I've found. Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.
Some days I paint and write and meditate, but some days I just sit about with zero motivation. I think that's natural though.
Here's the first major lesson: Writing is not an activity. It's not something you sit down at the keyboard, and just start doing. That's called 'typing.' Typing is an activity ... Writing is a process. And if you start thinking of it as a process, life gets so much easier.
Some days I wouldn't even go to class. I'd sit in the room and play video games with my friends and eat powdered mashed potatoes.
Twiddle-twiddle away at my softly clicky keyboard for a while, making twiddly adjustments all along- and then print what I have twiddled. Glare at the printout and snarl and curse and scribble almost illegibly all over it with a ballpoint pen. Go back to the machine and enter the scribbles. Repeat this procedure until I hate the very meaning of every word I know.
I think any start has to be a false start because really there’s no way to start. You just have to force yourself to sit down and turn off the quality censor. And you have to keep the censor off, or you start second-guessing every other sentence. Sometimes the suspicion of a possible false start comes through, and you have to suppress it to keep writing. But it gets more persistent. And the moment you know it’s really a false start is when you start … it’s hard to put into words.
By the time I was 4 or 5, I was doing 250 push-ups and sit-ups a day. When I was 6, we bumped it up to about 500 push-ups and sit-ups a day. Some days it could even be 750 or 1,000.
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