Blank pages beg to be filled, and it helps to have them around.
– Seth Godin
Keep blank pages around, but don’t keep them blank forever.
Category: writer’s inspiration
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You won’t be surprised given my proclivity to sailing, and poetry, and the occasional pipe, that it’s Ratty, is the figure with whom I identify most strongly. Although there’s a bit of Moley in me as well, I think.
– Malcolm GuiteSometimes the algorithm is correct. Malcolm Guite on YouTube might be the find of the year.
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All was a-shake and a-shiver – glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.
Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. United Kingdom, Welbeck Editions, 2021. pp11
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A reader beginning a poem is like someone stepping into a rowboat with a stranger at the oars; the first few draws on the long oars through the deep water tell a lot — is one safe, or is one apt to be soon drowned?
– Mary OliverA simile to help one recognize a “good” poem.
A Poetry Handbook might be the modern Rhymester
Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. Taiwan, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. pp56-57
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Imagine if Jhumpa Lahiri taught a class on journaling and diaries. What would the Syllabus look like?
From the Paris Review:
Course Description:
What inspires a writer to keep a diary, and how does reading a diary enhance our appreciation of the writer’s creative journey? How do we approach reading texts that were perhaps never intended to be published or read by others? What does keeping a diary teach us about dialogue and description, or about creating character and plot, about narrating the passage of time? How is a diary distinct from autofiction? In this workshop we will evaluate literary diaries—an intrinsically fluid genre—not only as autobiographical commentaries but as incubators of self-knowledge, experimentation, and intimate engagement with other texts. We will also read works in which the diary serves as a narrative device, blurring distinctions between confession and invention, and complicating the relationship between fact and fiction. Readings will serve as inspiration for establishing, appreciating, and cultivating this writerly practice.
Schedule
Week 1: Susan Sontag, Reborn: Diaries and Notebooks, 1947–1963
Week 2: André Gide, Journals and The Counterfeiters
Week 3: Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910–1923
Week 4: Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary
Week 5: Carolina Maria de Jesus, Child of the Dark
Week 6: Cesare Pavese, The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935–1950
Week 7: Bram Stoker, Dracula
Week 8: Robert Walser, A Schoolboy’s Diary; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Week 9: Leonora Carrington, Down Below; Primo Levi, “His Own Blacksmith: To Italo Calvino”
Week 10: Annie Ernaux, Happening
Week 11: Lydia Davis, “Cape Cod Diary”; Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness
Week 12: Alba de Céspedes, Forbidden Notebook
Week 13: Alba de Céspedes, Forbidden Notebook
Lahiri, Jhumpa. “Syllabus: Diaries.” The Paris Review, 28 Mar. 2024, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/03/28/syllabus-diaries/.I’d add two more to the list. Josep Pla‘s The Gray Notebook and Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle.
The Paris Review’s Syllabi series is a gem. Read the Archives here.
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But readers persist, silently making their way though the great works, keeping unbroken the chain that takes us back, generation by generation, through human history. It is not just scholarship that keeps great texts alive, but the life of the common reader, the silent, unheralded reader, who finds herself unable to complete a bus journey without resorting to her scrawny old copy of Bleak House
Henry Oliver, from The Life of a Common ReaderYou, dear reader, can be part of that unbroken chain.
Persist!
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My favourite illustration in the whole book is the very first. It shows the White Rabbit looking at his pocket-watch, worrying that it’s late. I copied that White Rabbit hundreds of times in my sketchbooks, trying to capture the worried expression in his eye, the folds of his coat and the wonderful shading at his feet.
– Chris RiddellYou can still see the influence of John Tenniel‘s Alice in Wonderland’s drawings in Chris Riddell’s work today.
What’s the illustration or picture you’ve copied hundreds of times in your sketchbooks?
Carroll, Lewis., Riddell, Chris. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Puffin Classics) London: Puffin Books, 2015. (from the introduction,pp vi)
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Certainly read the whole piece, but here is the print-it-out-and-hang-it-above-your-monitor version:
Be audacious.
Do grunt work.
Do the boring things.
Learn undefined skills.
Work hard.
Bring a sense of urgency & move fast.
Improve things.
Ask your naive questions.
Simplify things.
Follow up.
Show up during the hard times.
Figure out the first step.
Finish things.
No excuses then?
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I tell people who want to write they should try to write every single day without exception. They don’t all like hearing that. Obviously, it’s not how every writer works, but it’s a good initial test to see whether you really want to be a writer.
– Tyler CowenThis a good test of how badly one wants to write. Also, I’d take this as you don’t have to publish said writing.
You can keep it to yourself. Remember writing is a powerful method of thinking.
This from Tyler’s latest conversation with Rebecca F. Kuang:
Floodlights and Goalposts 