The Scribbling Novelist: New Students

Friday, April 3, 2009

And it starts again

Today is the Prospective Student day for my program--lots of things to do and I'm still sitting in bed wondering if I should participate or not. It's not that I'm bitter about something and just don't want to go--it's more that I called in "sick" to work today and I'm afraid of being found out. Well, to be fair, I really was not feeling all that great--definitely drained and should a drained person REALLY be forced into seven hours of customer service? No, I think not. So I'm semi-sick. It's more of a mental thing, really, and it's raining and gray, which makes me want to curl up in this fabulous bed of mine and catch a little nap. But alas... I have too much work.

So anyway--the prospective people are currently lunching, probably on catered sandwich rolls, potato salad, chips, etc., and here I am in bed blogging and working on a paper for work. The month of April is going to be chaotic for me--I need to get into things now, which means that I probably shouldn't be socializing as much this weekend. Sigh. So we'll probably have at least 5 new fiction people for next semester--AND I've taken six classes already. Six of the ten that I need to graduate. I feel cheated out of the 3 year program that I thought I would have. I'll likely be finished by next December (if not May) and I'm starting to feel rushed. I haven't even been writing! I write when I have to, not when I want to, because I work so damn much just to stay afloat. I can't blame anyone but myself for this, however, but it sure is nice to bitch about it.

Other news: nothing to report. How sad.

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

Friday, April 3, 2009

And it starts again

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