A Writer's Moment: Expressions of Yourself

A Writer's Moment: Expressions of Yourself:   “What is writing but an expression of myself.” – Zane Grey If you are a writer, you always have self doubts about what you are puttin...

Expressions of Yourself

 “What is writing but an expression of myself.” – Zane Grey

If you are a writer, you always have self doubts about what you are putting down.  Is it good?  Will people care?  Why should they care?  Ultimately, of course, you just need to be happy for and with yourself and the writing you produce.  If you aren’t, or can’t, then you need to re-think whether or not you have chosen the right path.

In a 1925 letter to his father about his newest book The Torrents of Spring, Ernest Hemingway said he thought it was a funny but wasn’t sure others would like it.   

 

“I know what I’m doing," he wrote,  "and it doesn’t make any difference either way what anybody says about it.  Naturally it is nice to have people like it.  But it is inside yourself that you have to judge and nothing anybody says outside can help you anymore than anybody can help you shoot when a partridge flies up.  Either you hit them or you don’t.  Good instruction beforehand teaching you to shoot, etc., is fine.  But after a while it all depends on yourself and you have to be your own worst critic.”

 

And so it goes for one's efforts as a writer.

  

Ernest Hemingway                       Zane Grey

 These two writers were contemporaries and outdoorsmen.  They admired each other's work but never met.

A Writer's Moment: True Wildness Is . . .

A Writer's Moment: True Wildness Is . . .:   “True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face o...

True Wildness Is . . .

 “True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.” – Robert Bly

 

Born in Minnesota in 1926, Bly was a poet, essayist and activist and winner of The National Book Award for Poetry for The Light Around the Body.

 

For Saturday’s Poem, here is Bly’s,

 

Solitude Late at Night in the Wood

It is a joy to walk in the bare woods.
The moonlight is not broken by the heavy leaves.
The leaves are down, and touching the soaked earth,
Giving off the odors that partridges love."

 

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A Writer's Moment: Writing What You Know

A Writer's Moment: Writing What You Know:   Jessica Burkhart, born in Tennessee on this date in 1987, started writing as an 8 th grader and is still going strong.  While recuperati...

Writing What You Know

 Jessica Burkhart, born in Tennessee on this date in 1987, started writing as an 8^th grader and is still going strong.  While recuperating from a major surgical procedure, she decided to start writing to fill her hours and because she was convinced that she could produce articles that were at least as good as those she had been reading in magazines and journals brought to entertain her. 

At first she tried writing what she thought those magazines wanted, which led to a couple years' worth of rejections.  Then she turned to writing about what she knew – in her case a love of animals and her volunteer work with the Humane Society – a formula that more often than not leads to success.  It was a good choice, indeed.

By age 18, she had over 100 published articles in everything from Girls’ Life to The Writer.  At age 19, she signed up for the annual National Novel Writing Month, a challenge to write a 50,000 word (or longer) novel in 30 days.  Again, she chose to write what she knew and loved – horseback riding.

Having started her own blog, she wrote about the experience of doing her first book, and as luck would have it (and luck does indeed often play a part in getting first books accepted) a literary agent who was perusing blogs spotted her post.  The woman liked what she read and signed up Jessica as a client.    Burkhart’s first book, Take The Reins, resulted in the birth of The Canterwood Crest series, written for Tweens.  

 

Jessica “Burkhart” Ashley

Burkhart, whose real last name is Ashley, now has authored 20 novels and is still going strong.  She’s a testament to writing what you know … and turning dreams into reality.   

A Writer's Moment: Finding That Writer-Reader Connection

A Writer's Moment: Finding That Writer-Reader Connection: “Writing a song is much like being an author. Yes, we all have tools to write (everyone has a brain I hope!), but that d...

Finding That Writer-Reader Connection

“Writing a song is much like being an author. Yes, we all have tools to write (everyone has a brain I hope!), but that doesn't all of a sudden make us best selling authors.” – Ken Hill

Born on this date in 1937, British playwright Hill was an acclaimed theater producer and director, primarily on the stage of the Theatre Royal Stratford East and on London’s West End.  Among his many hits were The Invisible Man and the original stage version of The Phantom of the Opera, which inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber to create his own musical blockbuster version.

 

Hill’s stock-in-trade was musical adventure stories, including Zorro, The Musical.  Hill died of cancer at age 57 and part of his lasting legacy was the establishment of a memorial trust to help nurture new writing talent for theater.  The trust also gives the annual “Ken Hill Awards” for Best New Musical and to support new playwrights with writing and producing their work.

 

An investigative journalist before he started writing for theater, Hill also was a gifted composer and said that composers, like authors, have a lot in common with the people for whom they are writing.  “The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.”

 

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A Writer's Moment: Just 'Begin at the Beginning'

A Writer's Moment: Just 'Begin at the Beginning':   “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Lewis Carroll. ...

Just 'Begin at the Beginning'

 “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Lewis Carroll.

Carroll was born Charles Dodgson on this day in 1832 in the small English village of Daresbury, England.  The eldest in a family of 11 children, he grew adept at an early age of entertaining both himself and his siblings with his storytelling ability.

 

 

As a babysitting aide, he made up stories for his siblings and their friends, something he continued doing into his 20s and 30s, including for the children of good friend Henry George Liddell.   It was Alice Liddell who often is credited with being the inspiration for his best-known story. On a picnic outing with the Liddell family, he told Alice and her sisters an amazing tale of a dream world.  Alice was so enamored she insisted Carroll write the story down so she could both relive it and share it with her friends.

Through a series of coincidences, the story fell into the hands of novelist Henry Kingsley, who urged Carroll to publish it. And in 1865 the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was born.  It would become the most popular children’s book in England, then America, and then throughout the world before Carroll’s death in 1898.

How did a professional mathematician and photographer spin such a yarn?  Perhaps two of his lasting quotes will suffice: “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop.”  And, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

A Writer's Moment: Zero In On Your Audience

A Writer's Moment: Zero In On Your Audience:   “I find you write with one person in mind. Usually for me that one person is my wife, because she's my most severe critic and understa...

Zero In On Your Audience

 “I find you write with one person in mind. Usually for me that one person is my wife, because she's my most severe critic and understands best what I'm trying to do.” – Jonathan Carroll

Born in New York City on this date in 1949, Carroll is primarily known for works that may be labeled magic realism, slipstream or contemporary fantasy, although he says he’s never really thought of himself as a fantasy writer.  

 

The son of an actress and a film director, he graduated from Rutgers and then gravitated to Europe, settling in Austria where he’s lived since the 1970s.   There, in Vienna, he’s combined successful teaching and writing careers, teaching at the American International School and turning out many award-winning pieces.

Carroll's short story, "Friend's Best Man,” won the World Fantasy Award, and his novel, Outside the Dog Museum won the British Fantasy Award.  His collection of short stories, The Woman Who Married A Cloud: Collected Stories, earned the coveted Bram Stoker Award, and his short story "Uh-Oh City" won the French Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire.  Carroll has been a runner-up for numerous other World Fantasy Awards, Hugo, and British Fantasy Awards.  To date, he’s penned 17 novels, half-dozen novellas, 3 short story collections, and one nonfiction book. 

“I write about what interests me,” he said.  “It's very dangerous when you try to satisfy an audience.”

 

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A Writer's Moment: A Keen Weaver of Thoughts and Reality

A Writer's Moment: A Keen Weaver of Thoughts and Reality: “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.” – Virginia Woolf ...

A Keen Weaver of Thoughts and Reality

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.” – Virginia Woolf

Born this day in 1882, English writer Virginia Woolf has often been credited with stream of consciousness writing alongside her modernist contemporaries James Joyce and Joseph Conrad.  Her writing had (and has) many admirers and probably an equal number of haters and in her own time was banned by some countries, including Adolf Hitler's Germany.    Her most well-known works are To The Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own. 

  

A great essayist as well as novelist, she once noted “A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.”  

 

But it was fiction writing where Woolf made her lasting mark and for which she is still studied today.  She said she found herself intrigued by and drawn into writing fiction because of how it so keenly wove together thoughts and reality.  “Fiction,” she said,  “is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.  Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.”

 

 

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