Emdashery Blog

Random quote: kill your darlings--

"Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."
--Colette

Today, I am indeed a destroyer as I attack my latest ghostwritten manuscript with a red pen vengeance. It can actually be quite therapeutic...

Random Quote: Morley Callaghan--

There is only one trait that marks the writer. He is always watching. It's a trick of the mind, and he is born with it.

--Morley Callaghan

I hope your watching today is fruitful...

Quote of the (Random) Day--

I found this quote via Mark Goodyear who has a great-looking new blog at goodwordediting.com. The quote comes from Annie Dillard's book, The Writing Life:

Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know.

The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write.

Mark uses this quote to refer the new year as a blank page. How will we fill it? For me, my writer's resolution is to simply fill more pages. Inspiration comes in the doing, not the preparing, and I spend far too much time thinking about and preparing to write stuff than I should. Like a pianist, I need to exercise my fingers more. And I need to give God more opportunities to slip me a few aha! moments.

Quote of the (Random) Day--

From a modern hero...a good reminder for the upcoming year:

I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.
—Václav Havel, Czech writer and dramatist, leader of the Velvet Revolution, and the first President of the Czech Republic.

Quote of the (Random) Day--

Something to remember after that 100th rejection from a publisher...

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it - but all that had gone before.
-- Jacob Riis, Danish-born Journalist, Photographer and Social Reformer

Quote of the (Random) Day--

It all comes down to the Nike slogan. Just do it. So many people tell me, well, I'm thinking of writing a book. Does anyone say I'm thinking of performing surgery, or I'm thinking of designing a building? Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it. No. Put your butt in a chair and write. And never mind feeling blocked. Everyone feels blocked all the time. Madeline L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time) once said, "Inspiration usually comes duing work, rather than before it."
-- Anna Quindlen, as quoted in Writers Digest, October 2006

As my friend, Jennifer Schuchmann, says, every writer needs a Button Chair--more specifically spelled, a Butt-In Chair. A chair that grabs hold of you and won't let go. A chair that forces you to write and won't accept fear of failure as an excuse to escape from its ruthless clutches.

My Kind of Marxism: Quote for the (Random) Day--

With the batteries in my book light dying last night, I thought of this quote by Groucho Marx:

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it is too dark to read.

And this is another favorite:

From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Or this one:

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

Or:

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

Quote of the (Random) Day--

To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all people divine.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

[I say "poet" includes "writer"]

Quote of the (Random) Day--

Books are everything (as read in Shelf Awareness):

Books are the carriers of tradition and the seeds of change; a source of solitary enjoyment and communal celebration; beautiful physical objects and abstract spaces for language and thought; work and pleasure; desirable and burdensome; always doomed and always thriving; cheap thrills and pricey enlightenment; worth talking about, worth fighting for, worth loving, worth sharing, worth making a life about.

--Jessica Stockton, events coordinator at McNally Robinson Booksellers, New York City, in a Forbes special report on books.

Quote of the (Random) Day--

For those who understand the difference between writing a 200-word devotion and a 2,000-word chapter...

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
- Mark Twain