Good stories are like a lover’s first touch
An exercise in random meanderings
Photo Prompt
Use this photo as a prompt, as a random catalyst, as an igniter for any writing project you're working on. Or … simply write a story about this photo in less than 250 words and share it.
Writing Thought(s)
Good stories are like a lover’s first touch. You don’t question them. You yield. You follow. You lose yourself. You become one. All writing should aspire to the charge of such erotics.
Whimsicality
Rhinoceros tickled with candy corn and little gummies and chew-chews—everything so easily becomes scrimshaws and rollicking rickshaws, but this is this, and that is that, and that is not this, and this is not that, so there, I say, so there!
Because Quotes Are Nice
“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”
~Francis Bacon
Because A Haiku
She was a cat person.
He was a dog person.
She was a cat person.
Publishing Thought(s)
“Publication and literature are a contradiction,” said Enrique Vila-Matas.
The more I aspire to write literature (define literature how you may), the more it’s received by agents, editors, and publishers with distaste. Or, perhaps more acurately, they desire it be more palatable, more plot-driven, more packageable. It needs to be a product that can be summarized in a few sentences.
I never wanted to write a product.
I often wonder who gets to write—and publish—literature. Some people get to take that risk, push those boundaries. They get to present work that fundamentally doesn’t “fit” because it’s different, because it challenges and surprises and perhaps bristles and annoys. It troubles, and in troubling, it excites. Lydia Davis gets to write literature. Ocean Vuong does. Sigrid Nunez does.
Imagine reducing their work to a few sentences. Imagine making it fit.
Rejection Thought(s)
One of the first bits of writing advice I received was to always have a submission in the mail. That way, when a rejection came, there would be hope in the mail.
You can do a lot with a few wisps of hope.
Some Things to Read
Teju Cole (a favorite author of mine) on the wonder of epiphanic writing. He recounts a passage from his book, Open City.
“Those pages, perhaps the strangest in the whole novel, were an attempt at a certain kind of epiphanic writing. In writing them, I was thinking about the many wonderful instances in which the density of a text, or the artfulness of a camera’s movement, had been used to evoke the overspilling world. I wanted to pay homage to that kind of inventory: of what could be felt or seen but never fully described.”