anne lamott
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
First of all, read that book.
Second of all, this is a great point. I feel like I get a lot of messages where writers are all dejected and full of self loathing because they don’t like what they’re writing because it isn’t perfect or as good as a famous author’s writing, etc. I also feel like that’s why NaNo is so hard for some people—they’re trying to write word by word and make it perfect, which isn’t the point. You have to just let the words flow and have faith in the editing process.
(Source: thataddisonlane, via writeworld)
There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.
(via teachingliteracy)
“Knowledge of your characters also emerges the way a Polaroid develops: it takes time for you to know them. One image that helps me begin to know the people in my fiction is something a friend once told me. She said that every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own. You get one, your awful Uncle Phil gets one, I get one, Tricia Nixon gets one, everyone gets one. And as long as you don’t hurt anyone, you really get to do with your acre as you please. You can plant fruit trees or flowers or alphabetized rows of vegetables, or nothing at all. If you want your acre to look like a giant garage sale, or an auto-wrecking yard, that’s what you get to do with it. There’s a fence around your acre, though, with a gate, and if people keep coming onto your land and sliming it or trying to get you to do what they thing is right, you get to ask them to leave. And they have to go, because this is your acre.
By the same token, each of your characters has an emotional acre that they tend, or don’t tend, in certain specific ways. One of the things you want to discover as you start out is what each person’s acre looks like. What is the person growing, and what sort of shape is the land in? this knowledge may not show up per se in what you write, but the point is that you need to find out as much as possible about the interior life of the people you are working with.”
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
This book is SO GOOD. We used it as a textbook for one of my writing classes and the way she conceptualizes the writing process, as in the quote above, will just totally change how you think about writing. Here’s a link to where you can buy it (directly from the publisher, not evil Amazon). Which you should. Now.
Bird by Bird is a great writing book, we used it as a textbook in one of my fiction classes.
(Source: takingthehobbstoisengard, via teachingliteracy)
