A Writer's Moment: It's 'the most notable moment'

A Writer's Moment: It's 'the most notable moment': "In every phenomenon, the beginning remains always the most notable moment.  Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain,...

It's 'the most notable moment'

"In every phenomenon, the beginning remains always the most notable moment.  Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do."  - Thomas Carlyle 

 

Born in Scotland on Dec. 4, 1795, Carlyle was a philosopher, teacher and journalist whose work influenced a generation of Victorian era writers, including Charles Dickens and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  

 

He was mesmerized by the concept of how "heroes" in our world shaped people’s hopes and aspirations and created the basis for great writing - or writer’s moments, if you will.  Primarily an essayist for several major newspapers, he also wrote a dozen books, the most famous being On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. 

 

Beyond his writing, Carlyle was a champion for the establishment of great libraries.  Often frustrated with the lack of good books in society, he was instrumental in founding the London Library and making books available to a broader reading public.

 

“In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream," he wrote . "The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”  

A Writer's Moment: 'First for yourself, then for your audience'

A Writer's Moment: 'First for yourself, then for your audience':   “I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.     Write because you love the art and ...

'First for yourself, then for your audience'

 

“I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.    Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.” – Ann Patchett

Born in Los Angeles on this date in 1962, Patchett is winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for her novel Bel Canto, and numerous accolades for The Magician's Assistant, also shortlisted for the Orange Prize, one of Great Britain’s most prestigious writing awards given annually to a female author of any nationality.

The daughter of novelist Jeanne Ray she had her first article published in the Paris Review when she was just 20 years old.  After working for Seventeen magazine for 9 years, she began her creative writing career with the novel The Patron Saint of Liars, which had modest sales but hit it big as a movie adaptation.

Also the editor of a short story collection, she opened her own bookstore in her hometown of Nashville, Tenn., when other stores were closing down and leaving few outlets for writers’ work.  In 2012 she was named by Time magazine as one of the "100 Most Influential People in the World." 

“I don't write for an audience,” Patchett said when asked that question.  “I don't think whether my book will sell, (and) I definitely don't try selling it before I finish writing it.

A Writer's Moment: 'A way of facing life . . . and history'

A Writer's Moment: 'A way of facing life . . . and history':   “Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide ...

'A way of facing life . . . and history'

 “Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.” – Tahar Ben Jelloun

A Moroccan whose first language is Arabic, Ben Jelloun has established his writing chops with work entirely in French. Born on this date in 1944, he started to write articles and reviews for the French newspaper Le Monde, while earning a doctorate degree in social psychiatry. In 1985 he published his first novel The Sand Child, which was widely celebrated, and in 1987 his second novel The Sacred Night won the major French writing award the Prix Goncourt.  

Both novels have now been translated into 4 dozen languages.

He also has earned acclaim for his efforts 

to foster peace and friendship among the Arabic and non-Arabic worlds and to fight 

injustice and racism through his essays and poetry, a medium he finds particularly powerful and recommends to all writers.

"I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity,” he said.   “For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.”