marylhurstenglish - Tumblr blog

[marylhurstenglish]

Let the readers do some of the work themselves.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (via thatlitsite)

[marylhurstenglish]

[marylhurstenglish]

Happiness is an illusion until you read a line that you swear you couldn’t have written but, somehow, managed to muster. It’s right there on the page.

Michael J. Seidlinger (via thatlitsite)

[marylhurstenglish]

What is the trick for writing dialogue? That you are not running a wiretap for the FBI. I used to have a boyfriend who was an assistant District Attorney in narcotics in New York and he used to have to read wiretaps. And he would bring them home, three feet high, two women who were watching television in their separate apartments, saying, “I need Pampers! Do you have Pampers? Did you see what he just did on that show?” Four thousand pages. They were girlfriends of suspects and it was a real cautionary tale in how you don’t want people to go on and on. And dialogue is nothing at all like how people talk. Dialogue, hopefully, if you’re doing it well, is a couple of well-chosen kernels that stand in for conversation, that represent conversation. Conversation is very boring. Even interesting conversations.

-This is the Story of a Happy Reader I The Hairpin (via thenewinquiry)

[marylhurstenglish]

You’ll have days of complete lack of faith in your abilities. But you have to keep coming back. That’s when you know you’re a writer – when you take the failures and appear at the desk again, over and over again.

Markus Zusak (via writingquotes)

[marylhurstenglish]

It’s easy to write when you have the inertia and storm of life behind; you on the flight, anyone is a poet. Falling in love, falling out, falling in line or falling apart makes it easy to be creative. You watch the world passing by like Alice down the rabbit hole. Harder is the idea of sitting, and stirring up life when calm is on you. And if my experience serves as example, the key to consistently creating good art is finding the eye of the storm instead of being tossed around by it.

Ronald Andrés Moore (via thatlitsite)

[marylhurstenglish]

A writing teacher once told me that the most successful movies and books were simple plots about complex characters. You should be able to articulate your concept in a couple of lines.

James Scott Bell, Fiction Attack (via writewild)

[marylhurstenglish]

Restaurant poems.

[marylhurstenglish]

[marylhurstenglish]

I have been trying to write for a while now. I have all these amazing ideas, but its really hard getting my thoughts onto paper. Thus, my ideas never really come to fruition. Do you have any advice?

Write the ideas down. If they are going to be stories, try and tell the stories you would like to read. Finish the things you start to write. Do it a lot and you will be a writer. The only way to do it is to do it. 

I’m just kidding. There are much easier ways of doing it. For example: On the top of a distant mountain there grows a tree with silver leaves. Once every year, at dawn on April 30th, this tree blossoms, with five flowers, and over the next hour each blossom becomes a berry, first a green berry, then black, then golden.

At the moment the five berries become golden, five white crows, who have been waiting on the mountain, and which you will have mistaken for snow, will swoop down on the tree, greedily stripping it of all its berries, and will fly off, laughing.

You must catch, with your bare hands, the smallest of the crows, and you must force it to give up the berry (the crows do not swallow the berries. They carry them far across the ocean, to an enchanter’s garden, to drop, one by one, into the mouth of his daughter, who will wake from her enchanted sleep only when a thousand such berries have been fed to her). When you have obtained the golden berry, you must place it under your tongue, and return directly to your home.

For the next week, you must speak to no-one, not even your loved ones or a highway patrol officer stopping you for speeding. Say nothing. Do not sleep. Let the berry sit beneath your tongue.

At midnight on the seventh day you must go to the highest place in your town (it is common to climb on roofs for this step) and, with the berry safely beneath your tongue, recite the whole of Fox in Socks. Do not let the berry slip from your tongue. Do not miss out any of the poem, or skip any of the bits of the Muddle Puddle Tweetle Poodle Beetle Noodle Bottle Paddle Battle.

Then, and only then, can you swallow the berry. You must return home as quickly as you can, for you have only half an hour at most before you fall into a deep sleep.

When you wake in the morning, you will be able to get your thoughts and ideas down onto the paper, and you will be a writer. 

[marylhurstenglish]

The Last Sunrays (by hellexiomida)

[marylhurstenglish]

Something that you feel will find its own form.

Jack Kerouac (via thatlitsite)

[marylhurstenglish]

“It is the bright shine of all the endured sorrow that will make us glow.” — Daily Haiku on Love by Tyler Knott Gregson #tylerknott

[marylhurstenglish]

Jess Row at Book Court, 8/14/14

[marylhurstenglish]

Dinosaurs didn’t read. Look what happened to them.. 

[marylhurstenglish]

In Hindsight

Barefoot, I’d crawl through dill and parsley to find the fat, green caterpillars that clung to the undersides of leaves. Upon being poked, tiny orange horns would protrude from their heads and then disappear. It was all good fun until I couldn’t get their smell off my fingers; it lingered, sour and astringent. I went back to chasing Cabbage Whites, fluttering bits of sky in soft sunshine. Each so strongly resembled the last that they might all have been plucked from the same cloud. One day, while flipping through a big brown volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, I discovered the smelly, horned caterpillars would one day transform into magnificent butterflies, big black wings with yellow spots and deep blue markings. They were rare and extravagant and far more complex than the puffs of pale white I was used to. I forgot all about my afternoon trysts with the sky. I hunted through the vegetable garden in search of soon-to-be Black Swallowtails, gripped their grubby green bodies with a grimace, and wrestled them into jars of parsley and dill. All winter I would wait for them to crack through their cocoons and quiver wings of indigo night. If I had known the wealth of complexities that lie outside the garden gate, I’d have painted myself with the powder of Cabbage White wings and basked in the glow of the reckoning.

[marylhurstenglish]

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story; to make them forget, whenever possible, that they are reading a story at all.

Stephen King (via writingquotes)