Because my brain is still reeling from the recent rewrite I did, I'm at a loss for something to write about today. It does happen! So I cast this question to you -- most important thing about writing, least important thing about writing?
Also, I saw Roger Ebert on Oprah. Impressive and wonderful as always.
Michelle's Spell of the Day
"One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself." Christopher Isherwood
Cocktail Hour
Drinking documentary suggestion: Every Little Step
Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Tuesday! Rest in peace, Barry Hannah!
12 comments:
The most important thing in writing is to reflect life. The least important thing in writing is the color of the ink.--Herman Northrop Frye
Or, conversibly, using the theory of the lamp and the concave glasses, one would concur, that the illumination of the homo sapienta is also paramount!--Dr. Irwin Corey (with the space between the words as tantamount)
We havest
he JUMBOS11 crayons' tooo!!!--Short bus and Special
I studied writings at St. Olaf's in Minnesota, then I hitched my way to Lake Superior, where I met Dan Cody. The rest is history. So the most important thing about writing is the story, or narrative, or plot, which is what you might end up in if you commit adultery like I did. And the least important thing is plain black suits. That's just my feeling.--Jay Gatsby
Oh, bless you, Jay. But don't you think that events must be linked to an eternal theme, a main idea that somehow connects to eternal, universal truths and, in the highest fiction, the divine spark of a religious epiphany? God bless you my son.--Archbishop Adam Midol, Cardinal of Detroit(Ret.)
Conflict is the key. You've gotta have a hot broad and a stud in there. One of them gets killed and then that's where I come in. It's the perfect formula. I never think of what's least important because I always think positive to get the job done. And I always do. Bet on it.--Mickey Spillane
Gratuitous violence and sex, contrary to what a lot of people would have you believe, can make you a lot of money. It was really starting to work for me until the accident. Try to avoid the wrong kind of family relationships as the least and the most important at the same time.--Christopher Moltisanti
The concept of "attunement" in fiction is critically important. When Ezra Pound declared in 1934 that "artists are the attenae of the race," and Marshall McLuhan 30 years later called them "people of integral awareness," both were using modern terms to update the ancient belief that works of the imagination might actually require a talent not only for invention but for attunement--for picking up signals already in the air. This is why the most forceful narratives and dramas seem less made up than distilled. They clarify events and experiences taken directly from the actual world. Thus, the Jazz Age is better known through the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who captured its energies in real time, than through any number of retrospective studies. And the alienated teenager, that fixture of modern American life, didn't fully exist until J.D.Salinger, with his faultless ear and attentive eye, coaxed him into being..--Sam Tanenhaus
No genre writer had sharper antennae than Shirley Jackson, whose gothic classic, "We Have Always Lived in the Castle," first published in 1962, was reissued last fall. Its narrator is an 18-year-old multiple murderess who lives with her devoted sister and fantasizes about killing again. She is "socially maladroit, highly self-conscious, and disdainful of others," Joyce Carol Oates wrote in a penetrating essay recently in The New York Review of Books. "She is 'special.'" Words that ring ominously in the context of the [real world killer] Dr. Amy Bishop.
Ms. Oates, of course, has examined violence as thoroughly as any living American writer. When I asked her what she had made of the [Bishop] case, she drew an explicit comparison between Dr. Bishop and Shirley Jackson's narrator: "She is a sociopath and has been enabled throughout her life by individuals around her who shielded her from punishment."
Ms. Oates' feminist credentials are in good order. But her assessment comes from beyond the realm of predigested doctrine. It echoes the blunt assertion made by [novelist Patricia] Cornwell. "People kill because they can. Women can be just as violent as men."--Sam T.
Can you get me St. Olaf's autograph, Michelle?--Klipspringer
The most important thing is found in the intent and purpose of the thing written. If it is, for example, written to sway a mob to rise up and oppress them who do not agree with a specific point of view then it is of evil intent. But if by re-arranging those words to inspire a people to see freedom (a la Paine) the purpose and intent are completely different and worthy.
Every writing has a purpose for being accomplished. Every writer an intent.
Least important...I kind of like anonymous' color of the ink suggestion.
who keeps leaving these obnoxious anonymous comments?
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