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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A Writer's Moment: 'Looking, Listening, Reading & Practice'

A Writer's Moment: 'Looking, Listening, Reading & Practice':   “The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking a...