A Writer's Moment: It's Always The Little Things

A Writer's Moment: It's Always The Little Things:   “It is not the straining for great things that is most effective; it is the doing the little things, the common duties, a little better an...

It's Always The Little Things

 “It is not the straining for great things that is most effective; it is the doing the little things, the common duties, a little better and better.” – Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

 

Born on this date in 1844, Phelps was a leading feminist and intellectual who challenged women's traditional roles in marriage and family and advocated for clothing reform for women.  A native of Boston, she was born as Mary Gray Phelps into a family of writers and took her mother’s name as her own pen name after her mother died of brain fever.

 

Her mother was a famous writer in her own right, but wrote under the pen name of H. Trusta.  Mary (Elizabeth) chose to use her mother’s name to both remember and honor her legacy. 

 

Besides her writings on feminist themes, Phelps also was a best-selling author of three spiritualist novels, led by the wildly popular The Gates Ajar about the afterlife.  Over her lifetime (she died in 1911), she wrote 31 novels, co-authored half-a-dozen more (including several with her husband Herbert Dickinson Ward), and numerous essays for popular magazines and newspapers. 

       Phelps also became active in the animal rights movement and her novel, Trixy, published in 1904, became a standard polemic against experimentation on animals.

 

‘A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer,” she said.  “Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press for admission.”

 

 

 

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A Simple Solution

 

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood.  I would just write a little faster.” – Isaac Asimov

A Writer's Moment: All Those Wonderful 'Things'

A Writer's Moment: All Those Wonderful 'Things':   “A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been giv...

All Those Wonderful 'Things'

 “A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” – Jorge Luis Borges

 

Born in August 1899, Borges was an Argentine poet who knew the value and power of the things within our own world and how beneficial they could be to a writer. 

 

 For Saturday’s Poem, here is Borges’ award-winning poem, simply titled,

 

                                                            Things

 

                                    My walking-stick, small change, key-ring,

The docile lock and the belated

Notes my few days left will grant

No time to read, the cards, the table,

A book, in its pages, that pressed

Violet, the leavings of an afternoon

Doubtless unforgettable, forgotten,

The reddened mirror facing to the west

Where burns illusory dawn. Many things,

Files, sills, atlases, wine-glasses, nails,

Which serve us, like unspeaking slaves,

So blind and so mysteriously secret!

They’ll long outlast our oblivion;

And never know that we are gone.

 

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A Writer's Moment: 'The Most Nourishing Forms Of Meditation'

A Writer's Moment: 'The Most Nourishing Forms Of Meditation': “I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the mos...

'The Most Nourishing Forms Of Meditation'

“I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.”  -- Kurt Vonnegut  

In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut published 14 novels, 3 short story collections, 5 plays, and 5 works of non-fiction. He is most famous for his darkly satirical, best-selling novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

Vonnegut always claimed that it was by reading other great writers that he himself developed the writing style and ideas that led to his success.  Among the most influential on his writing, he said, were George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry David Thoreau and H.G. Wells.

Born in Indianapolis in 1922, Vonnegut was a journalist first and credited journalistic writing as a key to his style – one that made his writing both straightforward and understandable by a wide audience.

“One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings,” he said.  “People are humanists … most of them, anyway.”

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A Writer's Moment: Choosing Your Adventure

A Writer's Moment: Choosing Your Adventure:   “There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won t.” – William ...

Choosing Your Adventure

 “There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won t.” – William Least Heat-Moon

 Born William Lewis Trogdon on this date in 1939, Least Heat-Moon is a travel writer and historian of European and Osage ancestry.   He is the author of a dozen books – many chronicling his unusual journeys around the United States – including the mega-bestsellers River Horse and Blue Highways.

 

A native of Missouri and graduate of the prestigious University of Missouri journalism school (where he majored in photojournalism and also has served on the faculty), Least Heat-Moon authors works that have been labeled “literary naturalism,” with the ecosystem serving as a foundation. 

 

      In his travelogues he often illustrates the hybrid relationship between humans and the environment and how each entity influences the other, presenting critiques of how societal progress can negatively affect the ecosystem. 

 

“Often,” Least Heat-Moon said, “I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know.”

 

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A Writer's Moment: Write For Yourself First

A Writer's Moment: Write For Yourself First: “Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.” – Alduous Huxley...

Write For Yourself First

“Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.” – Alduous Huxley

Few people have had as great an impact on the world’s thinking as Huxley, particularly from his novel Brave New World, ranked by those who do such rankings as somewhere between the Number 1 and Number 5 best fictional work in the English language written during the 20^th Century.

 

Born in England on this date in 1894, Huxley was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 7 different years.   He kept striving, through his many forms of writing, to find “the right words” to share his hopes and fears for the world and to encourage each individual to do his or her best to make it a better place.

“And, there is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving,” he said,  “and that's your own self.”

 

 

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A Writer's Moment: Expanding On 'Breathing Opportunities'

A Writer's Moment: Expanding On 'Breathing Opportunities': “Reviewers have called my books 'novels in verse.' I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas. Stanza means 'room...

Expanding On 'Breathing Opportunities'

“Reviewers have called my books 'novels in verse.' I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas. Stanza means 'room' in Latin, and I wanted there to be 'room' - breathing opportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them before starting again at the left margin” – Virginia Euwer Wolff

Not to be confused with British author Virginia Woolf, Euwer Wolff, born this day in 1937, is an American author of children's literature.   Her award-winning series Make Lemonade features a 14-year-old girl named LaVaughn, who babysits for the children of a 17-year-old single mother.  True Believer, the second in the three-book series (they’re not really a trilogy), won the 2001 National Book Award for Young People's Literature.   And, in 2011, she was the recipient of the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature.

 

Wolff said she uses her own teenage years as the foundation for her writing.  “The teenage years are the years to examine faith - the need to be independent and the need to be anchored,” she said. “It’s a time to ask, ‘Who made all this? And what do I have to do with it?’” 

  

I have enjoyed learning that she does her creative writing a lot like I do – slowly. 

 

“No one writes as slowly as I do, I'm convinced,” she said.  “It's so hard for me. I learn slowly; I make decisions at a snail's pace.”

 

“I work early in the morning,” she noted, “before my nasty critic gets up - he rises about noon. By then, I've put in much of a day's work.”

 

 

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