I write because…well, the best I can say for it is it’s a psychological quark of mine developed in response to whatever personal failings I have.”
— Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays
A Psychological Quark
Tag: Writing life
Controlling Experience
Writing is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience—mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious—rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance””
— Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays
The Work is an End
If you can work in such a way that the process will be pleasurable enough that even if nothing comes of it, the work is an end in and of itself—then you’ll be ok. It’s not a means to an end, the work is an end.”
— Jia Tolentino, On writing for the sake of writing
Tortoise
Oh, you do me wrong. Would I do anything wicked? I’m a peaceful soul, bothering nobody and leading a gentle, herbivorous life. And my thoughts merely drift among the oddities and quarks of how things are (as I see them). I, humble observer of phenomena, plod along and puff my silly words into the air rather unspectacularly, I am afraid.”
— Tortoise, Godel Escher Bach, Douglas Hofstadter
Love Words
Mundanity
There is no more efficient way to expose your own mundanity than through writing. So be it. Perhaps the mundane has some minor value.”
How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared released a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things in your life and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?”
— Ray Bradbury
“For me, writing is really just learning about things that interest me, and then trying to convince you to find them as interesting as I do.”
— Susan Orlean (via Austen Kleon)
“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
— Donald Winnicott, psychoanalyst (via Dana Levin)
132 // The Weekend Writing Plan
It was a good writing day, I just wish I’d had more of it to devote to writing rather than to chores.
The goal going forward is to wake up at 6:00 AM on both Saturday and Sunday and give 4 hours completely to writing. If there is anything to do later in the day, that’s fine. I’ll have written for four hours and justified doing anything else at all for the rest of the day. If there is nothing else to do I’ll have hit the ground running and earned a mid-morning nap before beginning again.
These entries are inspired by Thord D. Hedengren
