Miscellaneous Archives - Page 4 of 4 -

July

2012

Make Yourself Holy

To write fiction, you must make yourself holy. This is how. Immerse your heart in the dirty world. Crawl in its decay. Shout out its meager glories. Then leave. Then write. Then put down your pen and make dinner. It’s an odd pastime, fiction writing. First you must know the world intimately. Then you must […]

February

2012

Miscellaneous

Something like this really happened.

A waitress in a local coffee shop was complaining to me and everyone else about being 47. Her body aches with middle age. Her eyes hurt. She hates it. Riffing on your age is only socially acceptable if you are between 40 and 60 years old. If you are over 60, nobody wants to hear […]

February

2012

Miscellaneous

Triad

“And now it’s time to start the world anew,” said Judas with a kiss.

February

2012

Miscellaneous

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Will you miss it? What would you pay to see it pass?

But if the writing doesn't matter to the writer solely for its own sake, without hope of external validation, then it doesn't matter.

If you can’t write for yourself, if you can’t write for those shadows creeping along a silent wall and measuring out your time on this earth in increments of everything else you could be doing, if you can’t write while knowing you are destroying your time on a beautiful madness that nobody will ever validate and many will mock – then please don’t call yourself a writer. Real writing isn’t for sissies. It’s more than putting words on the page. It’s denying everything else to be able to put those words on the page while knowing that the mess of language you’ve created is all you’ll ever get out of it.

-Karen Michalson, “Why We Read Strangers”