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In the end, the best thing a writer can do for his society is to write as well as he can.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The role of the writer is not to say what all can say but what we are unable to say.
Anais Nin
Be regular and ordinary in your habits, like a petit bourgeois, so you may be violent and original in your work.
Gustave Flaubert
I shall live badly if I do not write.
Francoise Sagan
If thou art a writer, write as if thy time were short, for t is indeed short at the longest.
Henry David Thoreau
If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
Erica Jong
Anyone can become a writer. The trick is staying a writer.
Harlan Ellison
The unconscious creates, the ego edits.
Stanley Kunitz
Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.
Allen Ginsberg
I still have not way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line…
Yukio Mishima
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Many of us became writers because of our love of language. The look of it, the sound of it, the rhythm and music of it and its power. I'm not kidding. Language has stopped me dead in my tracks. Sometimes as I read along, the way a writer uses a word or places one against the other, makes me catch my breath and I have to say the words aloud. "Listen to this," I say to anyone nearby. Or "Wow," I breathe when I read the work of some language magician who spellbinds me with her sorcery of words and sounds and meanings.
"The language still strikes me as a miracle, a thing the deepest mind adores," said writer and teacher Barry Hannah.
And aren't we fortunate to have a language that gives us words like gladiola and lunacy, serendipitous and starstruck, poignant and persimmon? If you haven't stopped reading by now and begun your own list - even if just in your mind, I'd be surprised. I start some workshops with this playful exercise. With my whiteboard and markers, I ask participants to lob their favorite words out to me as I scribble them on the board. I like to fill the room with words we adore, let them bounce off the walls and surround us before we begin our work. This exercise isn't about the meaning of the words, but the sound and shape of them. How they taste in your mouth and feel in your ear. Try it sometime before you start your writing practice session.
But language is more than words. Language is music and rhythm; it is sound, rhyme and sibilance; it is texture and layers. Art and graffiti. Attitude and place, geography and history. Language is family and what you heard at the kitchen table and on the back porch, muffled behind closed doors and shouted up from stairwells. Language is what you do with words and it is the space between words.
Language is our life's work as writers as we struggle to find our voices, tell our stories, reel our tales and write our truth. "Developing a language of one's own, with its distinct colors and nuances, with maps and charts and images that voice the self, takes a long time," said Burghild Nina Holzer whose book, A WALK BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH, (Bell Tower, 1994), is a gentle guide to writing, the creative process, and living.
Sometimes beginning writers feel they must use the "correct" language, language a "real writer" would use. So they write outside their own language. They stiffen up and formalize. I had a teacher once who told me to "write like you talk." He didn't mean, literally, how I talk, but to write in the language that is native to me. Language that fit me like my favorite jeans. Or my never-fail little black dress. Language I would go to coffee with, like a best friend. Language I would serve to my family. The language of my secrets and my prayers. "Start there," he told me.
So this is what I urge you to do and this is what writing practice allows us. Start by playing your own music - sweet and low, discordant and loud, ragtime or traditional or hip-hop -- and then expand your repertoire, improvise and riff and jam and when you speak your true language, you'll know it. So will your readers.
Each day in your notebook write the words you love. This is a way to warm up, like clearing your throat before you speak. Playing scales. Note: these words will probably change on a regular basis. Every list I make contains different words. (Except for lollapalooza, which shows up nearly every time.)
Write stream of consciousness, allowing language that comes from the unconscious to take shape on your page. When you read this work aloud, you'll hear the language of your intuitive voice. Listen to it.
When you come across a phrase that knocks you silly, take note of it. Write it in your notebook. Study it. What about it do you love? Do this with your own writing as well as other writers' work. This is also a message from your intuitive self that will tell you about your natural voice. Or about that with which you harmonize.
Read poetry aloud before you write. Or listen to spoken word CDs. I know one writer whose husband, a poet, reads poetry to her while she writes, his own as well as other poets. And while we're on poetry and language and words, another book you might enjoy: POEMCRAZY, by Susan G. Wooldridge (Clarkson/Potter, 1996). I'm crazy about this book.
"At its best, when you lose your arrogance and are least selfish, [language] can sing back to you almost as a disembodied friend," said Barry Hannah.
Study it, craft it, use it (and notice how you use it), build with it, make a language raft and begin your voyage on the uncharted territory of the page.
Notes on Writing >>>
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