Quotation Saturday: Writing
Mamacita says: My obsession with writing has extended itself over into Quotation Saturday!
1. There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. –Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith
2. The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. –Anaïs Nin
3. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. –Ray Bradbury
4. Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. –E.L. Doctorow
5. A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. –Charles Peguy
6. And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. –Sylvia Plath
7. If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. –Toni Morrison
8. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. –Logan Pearsall Smith
9. The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium. –Norbet Platt
10. It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. –Vita Sackville-West
11. Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. –Sharon O’Brien
12. Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very;” your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. –Mark Twain
13. The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. –Vladimir Nabakov
14. Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. –Anton Chekhov
15. Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. –Orson Scott Card
16. The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. –Mark Twain
17. I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. –James Michener
18. If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. –Isaac Asimov
19. Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. –~Nathaniel Hawthorne
20. A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote. –Mignon McLaughlin
21. To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make. –Truman Capote
22. I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. –English Professor (Name Unknown), Ohio University (I’ve always wanted to put this on an essay!)
23. Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. –Hannah Arendt
24. It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order. –Ann Beattie (Twitter has this same problem.)
25. Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. –Gene Fowler
26. Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable. –Francis Bacon
27. Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum. –Graycie Harmon
28. Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. –Flannery O’Connor
29. Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains; God composes, why shouldn’t we? –Audra Foveo-Alba
30. When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing. –Enrique Jardiel Poncela
31. Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. –Sholem Asch
32. If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. –Lord Byron
33. I’d rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer. –Jack Smith
34. What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out of the window. –Burton Rascoe (. . . or husband, either.)
35. If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that’s read by persons who move their lips when they’re reading to themselves. –Don Marquis
36. You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke. –Arthur Polotnik
37. Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes. –Theodore Dreiser
38. How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. –Henry David Thoreau
39. It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write. –Sinclair Lewis
40. Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen? –Friedrich Nietzsche
41. One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one’s own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one’s pen. –Leo Tolstoy
42. Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. –Colette
43. One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. –Hart Crane
44. The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it. –Ernest Hemingway
45. There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen and writes. –William Makepeace Thackeray
46. Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it’s just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it. –David Sedaris
47. The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean. –Robert Louis Stevenson
48. The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. –Albert Camus
49. There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people if he’s any good. –F. Scott Fitzgerald
50. Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else. –Gloria Steinem
51. Yes there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters – to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people. –Logan Pearsall Smith
52. The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. –Tom Clancy
53. Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine. –Walter Cronkite
54. Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience. –Henry David Thoreau
55. Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write. –Elie Wiesel
56. Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself – it is the occurring which is difficult. –Stephen Leacock
57. You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you’ve got something to say. –F. Scott Fitzgerald
58. You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.–Jack London
59. The beauty of the written word is that it can be held close to the heart and read over and over again. — Florence Littauer
60. I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper. — Steve Martin
. . . and here I must stop, for there are so many wonderful quotations about writing that unless I DO stop now, I never will.
P.S. #61. Metaphors are like similes. –Anonymous (and some people will not understand this one in the least. Sad.)
BlogIndiana, WordCamp, BlogHer, BlogWorldExpo, and Pickles
Mamacita says: In a few days, I’ll be off to Blog Indiana – which you don’t have to be from Indiana to attend, why don’t all of you sign up, too?
I’m hooked now on writing conferences. Social media get-togethers have become my crack cocaine. No longer do I have to cook my meth in my neighbor’s front yard, over an open flame in full view of passing state cops – hey, it IS Indiana, remember, and near the river to boot – for now I can get my high by mingling with and listening to smart people talk about blogging, writing, social media, and all things such as them there. Not to mention honing my mad grammar skillz which have gone to poop pot in just these past few days of what might euphemistically be called “My Vacation.”
WordCamp got me hooked. BlogHer made it worse. Science in the Rockies helped me realize just how important social media connections can be; besides which, it was an absolute BLAST, and the most educational of all educational conferences I’ve ever attended. (Hurry and sign up for 2010!!) BlogIndiana will give me a much-needed fix. (It’s not too late to sign up!) And in October, I’ll be getting my blogging high on in Las Vegas at Blog World Expo, the Big One.
Someone recently asked me WHY I was so keen to go to the Expo. I highly respect this person and have for quite a while, so even though I answered her directly, I’ll answer her here as well, and not merely by saying “please see above.” Although I guess I just said that. I will then add that even though the social media thang is a few years old, it’s still pretty much brand-new, and those of us who are addicted are hooked pretty hard. Around these parts, at least, it’s impossible to find others with whom I can squee and ooooh and exchange points of view about social media and blogging and making all kinds of connections for my clients and doing the business thing with it and using it for things other than the “My babies are so beautiful this morning and I just HAD to tell everybody here” or “I’m having scrambled eggs this morning; what are you having” kind of communication, although such Twitters are interesting and informative to be sure. There is also so much more to it than having a My Space and selecting the appropriately goth/sparkly/NASCAR/DisneyPrincess/Hogwarts/polka-dotted background and making the dizzying decision as to who will be your TOP FRIENDS this week.
Side note: If you have a business and have no online presence, you’re losing out on a lot of connection opportunities. Get with it, old-timer. Put down your slide rule, slip that cover over your typewriter, get a phone that isn’t fastened to the wall, replace your Windows 95, and hire somebody who knows how to make your existence known without shelling out tons of money. Some money, thankyouverymuch, but not tons. Seriously, you’ll save tons and get megatons back. Hello, my email is on the sidebar.
Do you like baseball? Then you’ll LOVE Ultimate Baseball: The Game. Seriously.
But I digress.
School has already started for many of you. . . . nah, that’s another post in and of itself. “Never mind.”
Writing conferences. Come on, meet me there! You’ll also meet JustHeather, and maybe she’ll take a picture of YOU with a pickle hanging out of your mouth! If you’re lucky, that is.
Don’t be afraid. I’m harmless. I’m nice, really I am, apart from my terrible taste in pie, and. . . no, wait, that’s from Love Actually.
I am nice, though. Harmless, nice, eager to learn everything I possibly can about social media, business, giving YOUR enterprise an online presence to be valued and envied, blogging, and looking forward to next week for many, many reasons.
One of those reasons is the people. It would be really awesome if a lot of YOU were there.
Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It happens every day. –Albert Camus
Is bread the better for kneading? So is the heart. Knead it then by spiritual exercises; or God must knead it by afflictions. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare
Mamacita says: My family always knew when I’d had a particularly rough day in the public school; almost the very minute I got home, I would get out the ginorous stainless steel bowl and start throwing flour, yeast, sugar, salt, butter, eggs, and milk in it. Then, I’d set it on the stove top – no burners turned on! – and wait for an hour.
An hour later, the mixture would have risen to the very tippy-top of that huge bowl. Then came the therapy.
I would sprinkle flour over my very scrubbed kitchen table, turn the dough onto it, give it a name, and beat the shit out of it. The angrier I was, the better the bread was.
You see, with yeast bread, you really can’t knead it hard enough. With quick breads, you really don’t want to mix them very much. You can’t make quick bread when you’re angry.
But yeast bread?
I can’t put into words how therapeutic it is to use your hands to hit, hit, hit that pliable lump of dough, knowing in the back of your mind that what you’d really like to be doing is hitting something else, but knowing you’re not the hitting kind, so you make bread and hit, hit, hit it over and over again. Fold it over and use the heels of your hands to push, push, push it into shape. Knead it through four or five songs; sing along if you want. Knead rhythmically. The bread, if it’s made of the right stuff, will respond. Yes, it will change.
Unlike the real target of your anger, the bread will let you bully it into shape.
You can bully that lump of dough into loaves, into rolls, into doughnuts, into fancy star-shaped things of such lightness – because they’ve been properly molded, you see – that they fairly float up to the clouds. You can require that lump of dough to become something people will beg for, request, ask for by name. You can sprinkle sugar on it, melt butter on it, shake some cinnamon over it . . . .
Whatever you do to it, however you shape it, whatever you sprinkle on it, will be wonderful, because before you made it presentable to society, you made bloody sure it was going to behave itself and do what it was supposed to do.
Once the dough has been taught to behave, it can then soar to the clouds. It will then deserve butter, cinnamon, sugar, pecans, whatever you decide to enhance it with. Without that severe kneading, your dough will not respond properly and anything else you do to it will be wasted effort.
Now, don’t get all huffy with me. I’m not advocating hitting. I might, however, be recommending some discipline and some self-control. I might be hinting that nobody deserves anything until it’s rightfully earned. I might be connoting that before anyone gets all fancied up, he/she should be ready to deserve it. I might be outright, downright stating what I’ve outright, downright stated so many times before: nobody deserves anything he/she hasn’t rightfully earned.
Whether that be sugar and cinnamon, butter, toys-when-it’s-not-Christmas, parties, privileges, ice cream, a turn at the playground swings, a promotion, a life outside of a jail cell, a driver’s license, a good job, or a good grade: it doesn’t matter. Earn it or go without.
I’ll say it again: Life is full of choices. Choose to get behind the wheel of a car when you’re in no fit condition, and you’ve also chosen to deny yourself most other privileges you might have had free reign over had you not been such a duck-billed jackass.
Once you’ve whipped your dough into shape, you put it in the oven. Don’t think for a moment that your job is over, because you have to watch over it carefully while it’s in there. Take it out too soon, or leave it in too long, and all you’ve got is a mess. Be vigilant.
And if you do your job, the dough will do its job, and everybody in the world will be better for its existence.
Here’s how to do it:
Step one: have a lot of sex until you get pregnant.
Step One: Get out a ginormous bowl.
Step Two: Put 1/4 cup of yeast and a cup and a half of lukewarm water in the bowl. Stir in a tablespoon of sugar.
Step Three: To this mixture, add six eggs, two sticks of melted butter, four teaspoons of salt, and two cups of milk. Any kind of milk will work, even buttermilk or milk that’s a few days past the freshline.
Step Four: Start dumping flour in the bowl. Begin with four cups, and just go from there. Add flour and blend until you’ve got a bowl full of dough that just feels right.
Step Five: Set the bowl on the back of the stove and go play Facebook Bejeweled for an hour.
Step Six: Poke your finger into the dough. If it leaves a dent that doesn’t fill back up, it’s ready to knead some more. Knead it through three or four more songs.
Step Seven: Start shaping wads of the dough into loaves, and put each in a well-buttered loaf pan.
Step Eight. Roll out a wad of the dough and use your biscuit cutter to make rolls. They won’t look like biscuits after they rise.
Step Nine: If you have any dough left, roll it out thin, spread butter over it, and sprinkle it with sugar and cinnomon. Roll it up. Cut it into medallions, or stuff the intact rolled-up log into a big pan, or shape it like a heart. Use your imagination. Go nuts. Speaking of nuts, you can sprinkle them on your rolled-out dough along with the butter, sugar, and cinnamon if you like nuts.
Step Ten: Let it all rise again for about a half hour.
Step Eleven: Turn your oven on to 375, and put the loaves in. They will need about a half hour. After 30 minutes, just keep checking.
Step Twelve: After all your loaves are baked, turn your oven up a notch to 425. Put your rolls in, and watch them carefully; they need about fifteen minutes.
Step Lucky Thirteen: Last of all, put your rolled-up cinnamon goodies in the oven. They will need about fifteen minutes, also, unless you’ve got a loaf, in which case it will need about a half hour. Be sure your pans are well-buttered, because the sugar will leak out and stick. If you like your buns sticky (heh) put some pancake syrup, honey, and vanilla in the bottom of your pan and set the sliced rolls on top. Watch these even more carefully than you watched the plainer breads.
Step Fourteen: Bag everything up because homemade breads get stale fast. Set some aside for your family, and put the rest in a box. Get in your car with the box and start giving your bread away.
Step Fifteen: Accept the gratitude and praise gracefully. Understand that without all that careful preparation, you would not have delicious and beautiful breads for your family and friends to eat. Realize that everything worth doing requires effort and dedication. Remember that to deserve recognition and praise of any kind, you first have to do something worthy of recognition and praise.
Remember that the lump of dough would be nothing but a grayish inedible smelly lump of ick fit only to bury in the back yard in the dead of night, in shame, if you didn’t do it right. Understand that when you DO do it right, you’ve got wondrous treasure that other people will also recognize and desire.
Then take a good long look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself: Am I kneading myself properly? Am I kneading my children in such a way that they will know and understand how to do this by themselves when the time comes? Do we do what is right no matter what, or do we settle for what is easy? Am I teaching my children, and myself, to work for what they want, or to go without it?
You’d better be.
Because if you expect things handed to you without effort, and are enabling your children to expect the same entitlements, you’re a bad, bad parent, a bad, bad person.
P.S. That’s a real yeast bread recipe. I’m making some tonight, as a matter of fact, and I feel better already.
And guess who I’m hitting, hitting, hitting, over and over and over again? Yep, you got it.
SCUM.
