Writing: It's Hard
from 365 Affirmations for the Writer
February 1
Characters
When writing a novel a writer
should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a
caricature.
— Ernest Hemingway, from Death in the Afternoon
February 2
Characters
I have to know my character
thoroughly before I start, and know how he’d act in every situation. If I am
writing about Mr. Tidwinkle’s golf game, I must also know how he would act when
drunk, or at a bachelor dinner, or in the bathtub or in bed — and it must all
be very real and ordinary.
— J. D. Salinger, to journalist
Shirley Ardman in
Motivation plays a big part in determining character. Right
now: list 10 things your character wants. Now list 10 things he/she doesn’t
want.
February 3
Characters
— Tatiana Maslany, Canadian actress
February 2
Characters
I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
— Stephen King, from Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror
Here’s a tip I got from Cynthia Leitich Smith at a Highlights whole novel
workshop: look through magazines or on-line for images that best fit your
character, print/cut them out and tape them up at your writing desk or keep
them in a folder labeled characters.
February 3
Getting Started
Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until
the faucet is turned on.
― Louis L’Amour
February 4
Writers in Action
John
Cheever wrote some of his early stories in his underwear. Hemingway is said to
have written some of his fiction while standing up. Thomas Wolfe reportedly
wrote parts of his voluminous novels while leaning over the top of a
refrigerator. Flannery O’Connor sat for two hours every day at a typewriter
facing the back of a clothes dresser, so that in those last painful years, when
she was dying of lupus, she’d have as close to nothing as possible to look at
while she wrote her stories about sin.
― Kent Haruf, New York
Times, “Writers on Writing”
February 5
It’s Hard
That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
― Friedrich
Nietzsche
February 6
It’s Hard
A blank piece of paper is God’s way
of telling us how hard it is to be God.
― Sidney Sheldon
February 7
Rejection
It’s a shame publishers send rejection slips. Writers should
get something more substantial than a slip that amounts to a pile of confetti.
Publishers should send something heavier. Editors should send out rejection
bricks, so at the end of a lot of years, you would have something to show
besides a wheelbarrow of rejection slips. Instead you could have enough bricks
to build a house.
― Jerry
Spinelli
Comments