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I finish them all. This comes out of some kind of professional pride. I finish even if I know or strongly suspect a story is crap. You’ve got to get it done and see what you’ve got. Put it in a drawer for a few weeks—this cliché is true—and then take it out again, rub your hand over the material and look for the hot-spots. By a hot-spot I mean merely the good stuff, the true stuff. Actually, it’s what you tend to wriggle away from on the page. The stuff that makes you feel uncomfortable or shameful in some way. The stuff that embarrasses you, that isn’t trying to sound like, you know, a piece of cool prose. The stuff that comes from deep within you and mortifies you. These are the hot-spots. They make a story come alive.
KEVIN BARRY
Saturday, November 06, 2021
Kevin Barry
Thursday, November 04, 2021
August Wilson Quotes
“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.”
-- August Wilson
“All you need in the world is love and laughter. That's all anybody needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other.”
-- August Wilson
“You get to the point where your demons, which are terrifying, get smaller and smaller and you get bigger and bigger.”
-- August Wilson
“I work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.”
-- August Wilson
“So somehow, things that seem extraneous to the play in reality are not. The scene lasts 37 minutes, and you only need 12 minutes of that for the plot. But if you pull the rest of it out, it's not my play.”
-- August Wilson
“Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.”
-- August Wilson
“All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.”
-- August Wilson
“When I first started writing plays I couldn't write good dialogue because I didn't respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking.”
-- August Wilson
“The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is.”
-- August Wilson
“Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.”
-- August Wilson
“Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone's disbelief.”
-- August Wilson
“There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.”
-- August Wilson
“My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.”
-- August Wilson
“I think the play offers (white Americans) a different way to look at black Americans For instance, in 'Fences' they see a garbageman, a person they don't really look at, although they see a garbageman every day. By looking at Troy's life, white people find out that the content of this black garbageman's life is affected by the same things- love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty. Recognizing that these things are as much part of his life as theirs can affect how they think about and deal with black people in their lives.”
-- August Wilson
“We were land-based agrarian people from Africa. We were uprooted from Africa, and we spent 200 years developing our culture as black Americans. And then we left the South. We uprooted ourselves and attempted to transplant this culture to the pavements of the industrialized North. And it was a transplant that did not take. I think if we had stayed in the South, we would have been a stronger people. And because the connection between the South of the 20's, 30's and 40's has been broken, it's very difficult to understand who we are.”
-- August Wilson
“The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural expression and the cultural response to blacks in America and to the situation that they find themselves in. And contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. And as part of the oral tradition, this is a way of passing along information.”
-- August Wilson
“A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.”
-- August Wilson
“I think all in all, one thing a lot of plays seem to be saying is that we need to, as black Americans, to make a connection with our past in order to determine the kind of future we're going to have. In other words, we simply need to know who we are in relation to our historical presence in America.”
-- August Wilson
“I don't write for a particular audience.”
-- August Wilson
“Life don't owe you nothing.”
-- August Wilson
“The details of our struggle to survive and prosper, in what has been a difficult and sometimes bitter relationship with a system of laws and practices that deny us access to the tools necessary for productive and industrious life, are available to any serious student of history or sociology.”
-- August Wilson
“I think that as a playwright, if I detail that environment, then I'm taking away something from them [designers]. I'm taking away their creativity and their ability to have input themselves, not just to follow what the playwright has written. So I do a minimum set description and let the designers create within that.”
-- August Wilson
“I know some things when I start. I know, let's say, that the play is going to be a 1970s or a 1930s play, and it's going to be about a piano, but that's it. I slowly discover who the characters are as I go along.”
-- August Wilson
“You are responsible for the world that you live in. It is not government's responsibility. It is not your school's or your social club's or your church's or your neighbor's or your fellow citizen's. It is yours, utterly and singularly yours.”
-- August Wilson
“You got to be right with yourself before you can be right with anybody else.”
-- August Wilson
“I believe in the American theatre. I believe in its power to inform about the human condition, its power to heal ... its power to uncover the truths we wrestle from uncertain and sometimes unyielding realities.”
-- August Wilson
“I don't write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but that's not why I write.”
-- August Wilson
“Between speeches and awards, you can find something to do every other week. It's hard to write. Your focus gets splintered. Once you put one thing in your calendar, that month is gone.”
-- August Wilson
“As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.”
-- August Wilson
“You got to take the crookeds with the straights. That's what Papa used to say.”
-- August Wilson
Confront
“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.”
―
Strangers
“I been with strangers all day and they treated me like family. I come in here to family and you treat me like a stranger.”
― The Piano Lesson
Bengal Spice Celestial Seasonings Herb Tea
Since I can't get myself to drink a quart of ice water (for my post swim hydration*) on a thirty four degree morning I am drinking herb tea quart Bengal Spice and it's delicious with noting in it. 2 bags makes a quart pot.
* headache prevention through hydration. Swimmers often forget that we sweat in the water.
The Process
The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity.
REBECCA SOLNIT
Rebecca Solnit
Write a good sentence, then a good paragraph, and don’t be dreaming about writing the great American novel or what you’ll wear at the awards ceremony because that’s not what writing’s about or how you get there from here. The road is made entirely out of words.
REBECCA SOLNIT
Wednesday, November 03, 2021
Your brain will never stop for the day, even if you have stopped working,
When you're writing and come to a rough spot and the ideas just aren't flowing, put down dummy text and keep on moving—especially if it's at the end of the day and you're going to stop. Your brain will never stop for the day, even if you have stopped working, and there's a very good chance you'll come up with something better. Also, at the very least, you'll have something to come back to the next day, instead of a blank page. That's important.
LARRY GELBART
Suspense
Sarah Davidson's Collage technique
In 1974, I was assigned by The New York Times Magazine to write about the kidnaping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army in Berkeley, California. I spent weeks poking around the Bay Area, but when the deadline approached, Patty was still at large and had joined her kidnapers in robbing the Hibernia bank, wielding a sawed-off M-1 carbine. No one knew what had actually happened, the story was still developing, and I told Didion I was struggling with how the hell to structure it. She advised me to write scenes on index cards—interviews I’d done and events I’d witnessed. “Then spread them on the floor and see how you can fit them together, with space breaks in between. Like arranging a patchwork quilt.” She’d done this with numerous pieces, including the iconic essay, “Slouching Toward Bethlehem.” Doubtful at first, I tried it and found it worked.SARA DAVIDSON
The Secret
The secret to the season of November and December is to get COZY. Build a nest of books and blankets and climb in.
BC
“No matter what historians claimed, BC really stood for "Before Coffee.”
― Master of the Mountain
George Orwell
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
―
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