The Scribbling Novelist: I think I just had my last workshop!

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

I think I just had my last workshop!

Wow, so besides the fact that I haven't been a regular poster this semester (or last)... I think I just had my last workshop class tonight. I may get to do one more revision, but this may be it. I can hardly believe it. Seems like I just started this thing yesterday. If I think about my first workshop story in the Fall 2008 to this one tonight, I can say that I've made some huge advancements. I feel like I've regained some of the confidence that I lost the first year. Too bad my classes are over now because I think that with one more year with this program I would have so much more experience under me. Now, it's thesis time, which I have yet to really start work on.

You know, for all the ups and downs that I've reported on this blog. In the end, well, the end of fiction workshop anyway, I feel really satisfied. It feels like a good note to end on--maybe I won't do another revision. Now if I could just get something published! :)

1 comment:

Unknown said...: Wow! You're done! (almost) I'm only about half way there.

I'm glad you ended workshop on a high note -- and I'm certain there are other ways to keep building up confidence. I could send you some of the published novels that I had to put down b/c they were so poorly written, for instance. Proof that you're better than you think you are. :); April 3, 2010 at 6:26 PM

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To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all. ~Lord Byron

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You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ~Ray Bradbury

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Writers aren't exactly people.... they're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind. ~Kahlil Gibran

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. ~Ernest Hemingway

From "Byron" a BBC movie: Shelley to Byron:
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Real writers can't sleep because there are stories batting around inside their heads. Real writers create characters they weep over, because they are so real. Real writers can't NOT write. I think you can make a person a better writer technically by having him/her attend workshops and creative writing programs… but I think that at the basal level, writers are born, not made. ~ Jodi Picoult

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. ~Charles Peguy

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~William Wordsworth

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer. ~Jack Smith

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Pen names are masks that allow us to unmask ourselves. ~C. Astrid Weber

Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear - and devils, too. ~Graycie Harmon

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. ~Hart Crane

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will. ~Goethe

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. ~Junot Diaz