Tell a Story

 from 365 Affirmations for the Writer

February 16

Writing as a Spiritual Process

Writing is a kind of meditation, a spiritual activity by which my soul is nourished.

― Jane Hertenstein

 

February 17

Writing as a Spiritual Process

If writers write not just with paper and ink or a word processor but with their own life’s blood, then I think something like [our own words being just as much to us as from us] is perhaps always the case. A book you write out of the depths of who you are, like a dream you dream out of those same depths, is entirely your own creation.

—Frederick Buechner, theologian and novelist, from Telling Secrets

 

Write a blog post or journal entry as if it were a prayer, tossed out into the universe.

February 18

Taking Risks

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.
― Louise Erdrich, from The Painted Drum

 

February 19

Writers in Action

There can be no great art, according to the poet Coleridge, without a certain strangeness. There come moments in every great novel when we are startled by some development that is at once perfectly fitting and completely unexpected—yet earned, those moments when the ordinary becomes extraordinary, the common is transcended.

 

One has to be crazy to write a novel, capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts to take over the work from time to time, capable of cracking the door open, invite in the craziness, strangeness in fiction cannot be faked.

 

A pathological wound is also helpful, some fatal childhood accident for which they feel responsible; shame and guilt are also driving forces, the feeling of never being quite good enough. Often one finds novelists are people who learned in childhood to turn, in times of distress, to their own fantasies or to fiction, the voice of some comforting writer, not to human beings near at hand.

― adapted from John Gardner, from On Becoming a Novelist 

 

Memoir is one way a writer can flush out a wound. Sort of like Where the Wild Things Are. Max was sent to bed without any supper and in the process of settling down his fantasies took over. Perhaps the best way to get over a slight or perceived injustice or the worst thing that has ever happened to you—is to write about it.

 

February 20

Books

If you want to be a writer, don’t worry so much about writing. Read as much as you can. Read as many different writers as you can. Soak up the styles.

― R. L. Stine, author of Goosebumps series

 

February 21

Tell a Story

Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.
― Anne McCaffrey, Irish-American science fiction writer

 

February 22

Tell a Story

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.
— Ray Bradbury, from Zen in the Art of Writing

February 23

Tell a Story

Life with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.”— Madeleine L’Engle, Mrs. Whatsit from A Wrinkle in Time

 

February 24

Tell a Story

The objective of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story …to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. 

— Stephen King, from On Writing

 

February 25

Tell a Story

I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.
— Edgar Rice Burroughs

 

February 26

Tell a Story

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.
— Somerset Maugham

 

Write like how you talk. Talk as if you are around the water cooler at work. Tell me a story that begins with, One time . . .