To be a great writer: know everything about adjectives and punctuation (rhythm)
have moral intelligence — which creates true authority in a writer.
To be a great writer: know everything about adjectives and punctuation (rhythm)
have moral intelligence — which creates true authority in a writer.
Mapping the world’s writing systems. Also see this visual history of how sounds became shapes and this short animation on who invented writing.
When was super depressed, I wasn’t working—I was always too depressed. Hemingway did his best work when he didn’t drink, then he drank himself to death and blew his head off with a shotgun. Someone asked John Cheever, “What’d you learn from Hemingway?” and he said “I learned not to blow my head off with a shotgun.” I remember going to the Michigan poetry festival, meeting Etheridge Knight there and Robert Creeley. Creeley was so drunk—he was reading and he only had one eye, of course, and had to hold his book like two inches from his face using his one good eye. But you look at somebody like George Saunders—I think he’s the best short story writer in English alive—that’s somebody who tries very hard to live a sane, alert life.
You’re present when you’re not drinking a fifth of Jack Daniel’s every day. It’s probably better for your writing career, you know? I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist.
In an interview with The Fix, Mary Karr debunks the toxic mythology that it is necessary to be damaged in order to be creative. My own vehement defiance to that mythology is what led me to choose Ray Bradbury – the ultimate epitome of creating from joy rather than suffering – as the subject of my contribution to The New York Times’ The Lives They Lived.
Pair with Karr on why writers write.
Dan Brown has revealed how he cures writer’s block.
By hanging upside down.
[He] straps himself to a table in his home gym that rotates him into a position that lets blood — and, it seems, ideas — flow to his head.
Brown, 48, said: “It does help. You’ve just got to relax and let go.
“The more you do it, the more you let go. Then soon it’s just, “Wow”.’
Dan Brown’s cure for writer’s block might seem kooky at first, but those who practice meditation know that headstands and other inversions significantly calm the nervous system and invite clarity of thought.
Complement with the daily routines and daily rituals of other famous writers, then see what some of today’s most exciting artists, writers, and designers do to break through their creative block.
Raymond Chandler on writing, with an admonition to define your own success and not fall for prestige alone.
In a meditation on famous authors in love with other art forms, Andrew O’Hagan seconds Ernest Hemingway’s reflection that “writing, at its best, is a lonely life.”
Also see Nabokov’s butterflies and Sylvia Plath’s drawings, then wash down with famous writers’ collected advice on the craft.
The only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice, in which she talks about writing and the craftsmanship of language. Transcript, well worth the read, here.