The Writer as Witness

 from 365 Affirmations for the Writer

February 12

Writers/Outsiders

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.

― Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Cuban novelist who wrote from exile

 

February 13

Writers/Outsiders
Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don’t come together in real groups.

― Anne Rice, author of Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles

 

Today it is easier now more than ever to join a critique group. With the advent of the Internet you can now meet other writers from the anonymity of your home computer. Google and make a list of on-line critique groups, read the sites and learn about each one, and find one you might be comfortable with, to show your work.

 

February 14

The Writer as Witness

To write is to invade another’s space, if only to memorialize it. To write is to invite angry censure from those who don’t write, or who don’t write in quite the way you do, for whom you may seem a threat. Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment.

― Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times, “Writers on Writing”

 

February 15

The Writer as Witness

The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

― E. L. Doctorow

Take a headline or trending news story and create a flash piece or poem around it. Here is an example. Frank O’Hara, a poet of the New York School, was on a ferry to Staten Island to appear at a reading. While on board he wrote a poem and presented it that evening. It became one of his most anthologized. “Lana Turner has collapsed!”

. . . I was in such a hurry

to meet you but the traffic

was acting exactly like the sky

and suddenly I see a headline

LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!