#dexterreads

[iamdexter123]

A good writer, like a good reader, has a mind’s ear. We mostly read prose in silence, but many readers have a keen inner ear that hears it. Dull, choppy, droning, jerky, feeble: these common criticisms of narrative are all faults in the sound of it. Lively, well-paced, flowing, strong, beautiful: these are all qualities of the sound of prose, and we rejoice in them as we read. Narrative writers need to train their mind’s ear to listen to their own prose, to hear as they write.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A 21st Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

[iamdexter123]

It might seem that the writer needs a gift of mimicry, like an impersonator, to achieve this variety of voices. But it isn’t like that. It’s more like what a serious actor does, sinking self in character-self. It’s a willingness to be the characters, letting what they think and say rise from inside them. It’s a willingness to share control with one’s creation.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A 21st Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

[iamdexter123]

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

- Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird

[iamdexter123]

‘When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,’ he said. ‘When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are NOT the story.’ Gould said something else that was interesting on the day I turned in my first two pieces: write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

- Stephen King, On Writing

[iamdexter123]

In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance—without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you’d never find the end.

- Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem

[iamdexter123]

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

- Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird

[iamdexter123]

In Japanese pottery, there’s an artful form of repair called kintsugi. When a piece of ceramic pottery breaks, rather than trying to restore it to its original condition, the artisan accentuates the fault using gold to fill the crack. This beautifully draws attention to where the work was broken, creating a golden vein. Instead of the flaw diminishing the work, it becomes a focal point, an area of both physical and aesthetic strength. The scar also tells the story of the piece, chronicling its past experience. We can apply this same technique to ourselves and embrace our imperfections.

- Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

[iamdexter123]

I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.

- Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War

[iamdexter123]

Red wrote too much too fast. Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself.

- Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose The Time War

[iamdexter123]

You are going to have to give and give and give, or there’s no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward.

- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

[iamdexter123]

Ye Zhetai had survived the Cultural Revolution so far, but he remained in the first mental stage. He refused to repent, to kill himself, or to become numb. When the physics professor walked onto the stage in front of the crowd, his expression clearly said: Let the cross I bear be even heavier.

- Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem

[iamdexter123]

By his forties, all he has managed to grow is a gentle sense of himself, akin to the transparent carapace of a soft-shelled crab. A mediocre review or careless slight can no longer harm him, but heartbreak, real true heartbreak, can pierce his thin hide and bring out the same shade of blood as ever. How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting?

- Andrew Sean Greer, Less

[iamdexter123]

All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair. Many get luck, and many get misery. Many are born to homes with books, many grow up in the swamps of war. In the end, all becomes dust. All stories conclude with a fade to black.

Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

[iamdexter123]

There was silence. The shadows seemed to have become part of the night once again. I thought over what I’d said, and I knew that it was true. At that moment, for once in my childhood, I was not scared of the dark, and I was perfectly willing to die (as willing as any seven-year-old, certain of his immortality, can be) if I died waiting for Lettie. Because she was my friend.

- Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of The Lane

[iamdexter123]

The difference [between past and present tense] is like the difference between a narrow-beam flashlight and sunlight. One shows a small, intense, brightly lit field with nothing around it; the other shows the world.

…

This externality and narrowness of its field of vision may be why so much present-tense narrative sounds cool—flat, unemotional, uninvolved. And therefore all rather alike.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A 21st Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

[iamdexter123]

Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work. The judgment that a work is complete—this is what I meant to do, and I stand by it—can come only from the writer, and it can be made rightly only by a writer who’s learned to read her own work.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A 21st Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story