The Scribbling Novelist: October 2010

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Returning to the Thesis

Soon--once I get comments from the last professor on my committee--I will pick up my thesis again and start revising based on their suggestions. Part of me just wants to leave it where it stands and never look at it again. Not because I'm unhappy with it, but because I've moved on. I don't want to be like the song that never ends. I don't want to pick at these stories for years and years to come. Stories get old to me after a while and I feel desperate to work on something new. I figure if no one wants them then they won't be published. And so far... I've only received form rejection letters on what I've been told is my strongest story. After all responses are in from outstanding submission, I think I'm done with literary journals for a while. I need to expand my horizon and look for other appropriate places--I'm not sure that lit journals are for me. Or, like the job market, competition is just too high. The only problem is that I wouldn't know where to begin looking for alternate sources.

I'm 230 pages into my new project--that's 78,751 words to date and I haven't started working on it yet today. Some days I write over ten pages and other days I get in just one. At least I'm still meeting my goal of writing a page a day. I wish the same could be said for my goals to get a little exercise each morning. Bah. One goal at a time, maybe. :)

My sister and I are going to see "Red" this weekend. I used to go to movies all the time, but now that I literally have NO spare spending money, I have to really pick and choose what looks good to me. Part of me really wants to see "The Social Network" because it's written by Aaron Sorkin, who I think is one of the better screen/TV writers out there. Hello, he's the creator of "West Wing"! Though, I recently learned that he was on cocaine while writing most of that show because he thought he needed the drug for the creative process. I'm glad that he's overcome that. He really is an excellent writer. I'm also planning on buying "How to Train Your Dragon" because it was the BEST movie from the spring. So good. I'll have to dig into my piggy bank to do it, but it'll be worth it to have that one in my collection.

I also recently went apple picking and made homemade applesauce. Cobbler is my next venture with the apples. I felt very "home on the prairie" at the farm. Farms are great. I think I was a farmer in another life. Or maybe it's just my Nebraska roots coming through.

Okay, enough randomness. Cheers.

Writing Quotes

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

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, then for a few close friends, and then for money. ~Moliere

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

But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think. ~Lord Byron

I write to discover what I think. ~Joan Didion

What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse. ~Ray Bradbury

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions. ~James Michener

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public. ~Winston Churchill

Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyze yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it. ~Octavia Butler

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:
"What makes you write?" Byron to Shelley: "My inability to prevent it."

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

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke. ~Arthur Polotnik

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

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Returning to the Thesis

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