“Convince yourself that you are working in clay not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes. No one will rush out and print it as it stands. Just put it down; then another. “ – Jacques Barzun
Writing Advice
Writing Advice
a picture’s worth…
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 1 Comment
My father always lined us up by the car on holidays to photograph us; my brother looking bored, me smirking, and my mother just trying to make the best of it. I have dozens of these photographs. My brother and I always complained about having to pose for them, but whenever my father took us up on our advice for candid pictures there I was caught with my mouth wide open, my eyes closed or looking oddly furtive.
What photographs do you have on your desk right now? Or on the wall or on your dresser or in albums or on your computer? What do they say about you and the people you love?
Writers are crazy about photographs, both in fiction and in memoir. They can lend a kind of shorthand to events. Anne Tyler in her 1980 novel Morgan’s Passing writes of a family photograph album with 15 pages devoted to the babyhood of the first of seven daughters…(to continue reading, click on the title above)
Writing Advice
quotes: a picture is worth …
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 1 Comment
There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.
– Ansel Adams
A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
– Eudora Welty
I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don’t find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges.
– William Albert Allard, “The Photographic Essay”
Writing Advice
quotes of the week: writer’s block
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 3 Comments
“Every writer I know had trouble writing.” – Joseph Heller
“There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.” – Joan Didion
“You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.” – Gustave Flaubert
Writing Advice
quote of the week: fiction into film
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 0 Comments
“I was not prepared for the emotional hammering I got when I saw [the film]….It is an eerie sensation to see events you have imagined in the privacy of your mind, and tried helplessly to transmit to others through little black marks on a page, loom up before you in an overwhelming visual experience.”
– Annie Proulx
Writing Advice
quote of the week: poetry
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 0 Comments
“Poetry began when somebody walked off a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, “Ah-h-h!” That was the first poem.”
– Lucille Clifton
Writing Advice
quote of the week
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 0 Comments
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.” Stephen King
Writing Advice
quote of the week
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 0 Comments
“I try to fill a notebook a month. There’s no quota on quality, just quantity – a full notebook, no matter what garbage I write. If it is the 25th of the month and I have only filled five pages and there are seventy more to fill by the end of the month, I have a lot of writing ahead of me in the next five days.” – Natalie Goldberg
Writing Advice
quote(s) of the week: courage
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 1 Comment
“Solitude, competitiveness and grief are the unavoidable lot of a writer only when there is no organization or network to which he can turn.” – Toni Morrison
“If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.” – Cynthia Ozick
Writing Advice
quote of the week
by Barbara Abercrombie • • 2 Comments
“At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then – and only then – it is handed to you.” – Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
