Posts tagged creativity
Posts tagged creativity
For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar’s gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
I CONJURE THIS INTREPID FANTASYSCAPE WITH TEARS BLED FROM THE WISDOM-WEARY EYES OF FIFTY THOUSAND IMAGINARY MAGICIANS. I PULL HEAVY DRAGS FROM THE BRUMES OF INSPIRATION WITH ENCHANTED BELLOWS MARAUDED FROM A GUILD OF CHURLISH MYTHICAL DWARVES. VAST BULBOUS RIDDLESPIDERS PUSH THE SILKEN STRANDS OF PURE WHIMSY THROUGH HIDEOUS ABDOMINAL SPINNERETS AND IT IS THAT WITH WHICH I WEAVE THIS AUDACIOUS COCOON OF EXQUISITE LIES. AND WHEN IT HATCHES A GREAT MOTH OF TITILLATION WILL AWAKEN AND ROAR AND BEAT ITS WINGS, AND THE POWDER SETTLING DOWN WILL ARREST THE HUMORS OF AN ENORMOUS TERRIBLE OLD BEGGAR, RELAXING THE VULTUROUS LEATHERY VICEGRIP HE’S FIXED AROUND YOUR CAPTIVE MIND.
The youngest Nobel Laureate in history was 25 years old when awarded the Nobel Prize.
The youngest Nobel Laureate to receive specifically the prize in Literature was 42 years old when awarded the prize.
From what I’ve gleaned so far, I don’t think there’s many aspiring writers who follow me who don’t have plenty of time left to break one or even both of those records.
30. Gustave Flaubert on George Sand
“A great cow full of ink.”
29. Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman
“…like a large shaggy dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.”
28. Friedrich Nietzsche on Dante Alighieri
“A hyena that wrote poetry on tombs.”
27. Harold Bloom on J.K. Rowling (2000)
“How to read ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.”
26. Vladimir Nabokov on Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Dostoevky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity — all this is difficult to admire.”
25. Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound
“A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”
24. Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley
“All raw, uncooked, protesting.”
23. H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw
“An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”
22. Joseph Conrad on D.H. Lawrence
“Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”
21. Lord Byron on John Keats (1820)
“Here are Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom… No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.”
20. Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad
“I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.”
19. Dylan Thomas on Rudyard Kipling
“Mr Kipling … stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.”
18. Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen
“Miss Austen’s novels … seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer … is marriageableness.”
17. Martin Amis on Miguel Cervantes
“Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that ‘Don Quixote’ could do.”
16. Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire (1864)
“I grow bored in France — and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire…the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.”
15. William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway
“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
14. Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
13. Gore Vidal on Truman Capote
“He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”
12. Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope
“There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”
11. Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway (1972)
“As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”
10. Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe (1876)
“An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”
9. Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac
“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
8. Elizabeth Bishop on J.D. Salinger
“I HATED [Catcher in the Rye]. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?”
7. D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville (1923)
“Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like ‘Moby Dick’….One wearies of the grand serieux. There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!”
6. W. H. Auden on Robert Browning
“I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.”
5. Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust (1948)
“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”
4. Mark Twain on Jane Austen (1898)
“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
3. Virginia Woolf on James Joyce
“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
2. William Faulkner on Mark Twain (1922)
“A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”
1. D.H. Lawrence on James Joyce (1928)
“My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.”
(Source: flavorwire.com)
- Write the first 250 words of a short story, but write them in ONE SENTENCE. Make sure that the sentence is grammatically correct and punctuated correctly. This exercise is intended to increase your powers in sentence writing.
- Write a dramatic scene between two people in which each has a secret…
I do a lot of fantasy writing, and whenever one of my stories has a mystical but sad ending, this is the theme track to my writing xD
(Source: Spotify)
For today’s Online Writing Community of the day we return to our native tumblr and a blog I have been a personal fan of since I started this one, many of the writing prompts I have reblogged were originally from Write World and they have one page called the writer’s toolbox I am especially fond of.
You can visit and follow Write World here
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
(Source: bonquiquilashandra)
“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say”
-Anaïs NinIt got me thinking, I’ve always had this idea that writing, as a profession, is like trying to catch bubbles. Because I’ve read and re-blogged a pile of articles about the habits of effective…
“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say”
-Anaïs Nin
It got me thinking, I’ve always had this idea that writing, as a profession, is like trying to catch bubbles. Because I’ve read and re-blogged a pile of articles about the habits of effective writers, almost all of them mention carrying a notebook, everywhere.
I think this is because as a writer, especially of fiction, you have ideas constantly but seldom in a format appropriate for the page, so there is this intermediate process where you have to sort of, convert it, refine it, and if you don’t record everything as it comes to you, then when you return to the idea it won’t be exactly the same as when the idea struck you, you’ll have lost something.
I read another quote that said writers are people who struggle with writing more than ordinary people, I think upon reflection I’ve worked out why, people who aren’t really writers will come back to an idea and just write it down as they remember it, real writers will go “No, that’s not quite right” or “It was a little different” and keep chasing that idea, keep trying to catch it, until they’ve captured exactly the feeling that struck them when they first had it, and only then touch pen to paper.
