WRITE NOW NEWSLETTER – ESSAY ARCHIVES
- 2013 April ”I beg to urge you everyone:
Life and Death are a Great Matter
Awaken, awaken, awaken
Time passes quickly
Do not waste this precious life.”
– Zen Evening Chant
- 2013 March ”You can fix anything but a blank page.” – Nora Roberts
- 2013 February ”Go into cubeland in a tightly controlled corporate environment and you immediately sense that there is a malaise about being tied behind a computer screen seated all day. The soul of the nation is sapped, and now it’s time for the soul of the nation to rise.” – Dr. James Lavine, Mayo Clinic
- 2013 January ”Many years ago I resolved never to bother with New Year’s resolutions, and I’ve stuck with it ever since.” ~Dave Beard
- 2012 December ”The reason we race isn’t so much to beat each other but to be with each other.” – Christopher McDougall, author of BORN TO RUN
- 2012 November ”The world is a lot more fun when you approach it with an exuberant imperfection.” – Chris Baty, NaNoWriMo founder and author of No Plot? No Problem!
- 2012 October ”Eventually you learn that the competition is against the little voice inside you that wants you to quit.” – George Sheehan, columnist, cardiologist, running legend
- 2012 September ”The calm mind allows one to connect with the inner self . . . the very source of our being. That’s where the music lives. That’s where my music comes from.” – Clarence Clemons
- 2012 August ”Do not be afraid of going slowly, only of standing still.” – Chinese proverb
- 2012 July ”Love is the spirit that motivates the artist’s journey.” – Eric Maisel
- 2012 June We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. ~ Ernest Hemingway
- 2012 May ”[T]he one thing I want for you is to recognize when you are really singing in writing practice and honor that. Trust that. When you were screaming on the page. Maybe that doesn’t make a whole book but that is the true seed.” – Natalie Goldberg
- 2012 April ”Don’t fight the trail. Take what it gives you. . . ”
- ultramarathon runner Caballo Blanco aka Micah True (died April 2012)
as quoted by Chris McDougall in BORN TO RUN
- 2012 March ”Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. – Rainer Maria Rilke
- 2012 February ”Shut up about ideal conditions. I am tired of hearing myself whine about needing a writing shed and, frankly, I’m tired of hearing you whine about it too.”
- Patti Digh in a blog article on Sheila Bender’s website athttp://writingitreal.com/2012/how-write-book-wee-rant
- 2012 January ”Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.” – Mark Twain
- 2011 December ”Never underestimate the strength of a woman. Never mess with one who runs 13.1 miles just for fun.” – Judi Welsh
- 2011 November ”Indecision may or may not be my problem.” – Jimmy Buffett
- 2011 October ”When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into. House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.” – ©Neil Gaiman
- 2011 September ”If you want to write and can’t figure out how to do it, try this: Pick an amount of time to sit at your desk every day. Start with twenty minutes, say, and work up as quickly as possible to as much time as you can spare. Do you really want to write? Sit for two hours a day.” ~ Ann Patchett
- 2011 August ”The world comes first; it’s older, tougher, more subtle and more magnificent that anything made from language. So when I go wandering from the desk, I’m not avoiding work, as it might appear; I’m stitching my work to the earth.” – Scott Russell Sanders
- 2011 July ”We make sacred pact. I promise teach karate to you. You promise learn. I say. You do. No questions.” – Mr. Miyagi from “The Karate Kid”
- 2011 June ”Writing a book is like washing an elephant. There’s no good place to begin or end and it’s hard to keep track of what you’ve already covered.” – Unknown
- 2011 May ”It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” – Coach John Wooden
- 2011 April ”There are no great people in this world, only great challenges which ordinary people rise to meet.” – William Frederick Halsey, Jr.
- 2011 March ”A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.” – Henrik Ibsen quotes (Major Norwegian playwright of the late 19th century, 1828-1906)
- 2011 February ”Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it.” – Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950)
- 2011 January ”May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions. ~Joey Adams
- 2010 December ”The world is a lot more fun when you approach it with an exuberant imperfection.” – Chris Baty, founder of NaNoWriMo
- 2010 November ”If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” – Margaret Atwood
- 2010 October ”The road to Wisdom? Well, it’s plain. And simple to express. Err and err, and err, again but less and less, and less.” – Piet Hein
- 2010 September ”What I don’t write is as important as what I write.“ Jamaica Kincaid
- 2010 August ”Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.” – Daphne Du Maurier
- 2010 July ”Three rules for literary success: 1. Read a lot. 2. Write a lot. 3. Read a lot more. 4. Write a lot more.” – Robert Silverberg
- 2010 June ”Love has its own time, its own season, and its own reasons for coming and going. You cannot bribe it or coerce it or reason it into staying. You can only embrace it when it arrives and give it away when it comes to you.” – Kent Nerburn
- 2010 May ”When screen technology progresses sufficiently, the idea of using paper will become a total anachronism. Paper won’t record and store your notes or annotations; screens will.” – Mike Shatzkin from his April 27, 2010 blog post “What I Would Have Said in London, Part 2″
- 2010 April ”I procrastinate to a point where I’m filled with self-loathing and then I start writing. It’s usually a state of self-loathing that gets me going.” – Michael Lewis
- 2010 March ”Well, I don’t know exactly how it’s done. I let it alone a good deal.” – Saul Bellow
- 2010 February They’re fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talk about writing or themselves. – Lillian Hellman
- 2010 January ”There’s two things that you don’t listen to: flattery, which can’t help you, and abuse, which can’t hurt you. You have to look at the facts.” – Jim Tressel
- 2009 December ”Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.” – Iris Murdoch
- 2009 November The Beauty of Deadlines.
- 2009 October It’s October! Time to prepare for NaNoWriMo.
- 2009 September ”A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” – Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955)
- 2009 August ”Do not worry.” – Hemingway
- 2009 July ”Wolves never look more funny than when they have lost the scent and scrabble to find it again: they hop in the air; they run in circles, they plow up the ground with their noses . . . .” – Clarissa Pinkola Estes
- 2009 June ”I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” – Mark Twain
- 2009 May ”I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.” – James Michener
- 2009 April ”Books are never finished, they are merely abandoned.” – Oscar Wilde
- 2009 March ”Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.” – T.S. Eliot
- 2009 February ”It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a writer in possession of an unpublished manuscript, must be in want of an agent.” – Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware Blogs
- 2009 January ”Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” ~ Cicero [106 B.C. to 43 B.C.]
- 2008 December ”I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.” – Truman Capote
- 2008 November ”Normal people can produce extraordinary things by simply refusing to leave a blank page blank.” – Chris Baty, creator of NaNoWriMo.org
- 2008 October ”I always do the first line well, but I have trouble doing the others.” – Moliere, from _The Ridiculous Precieuses_
- 2008 September ”Blank pages inspire me with terror.” – Margaret Atwood
- 2008 August ”When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” – Yogi Berra
- 2008 July ”I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” – Elmore Leonard
- 2008 June ”I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.” – Steven Wright
- 2008 May ”No one can tell you when to start and how to stop, either. And only you can put it off until there are no more tomorrows.” – Susan Bono
- 2008 April ”Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how . . . . We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.” – Agnes de Mille, dancer and choreographer
- 2008 March ”The one thing all nations share is the fear that a member of the family will want to be an artist.” – Robert Frost
- 2008 February If we had to say what writing is, we would define it essentially as an act of courage. – Cynthia Ozick
- 2008 January I’m beside myself with grief.
- 2007 December ”You’re gonna buy gifts. Buy books!”
- 2007 November ”Anybody can become a writer, but the trick is to stay a writer” – Harlan Ellison
- 2007 October ”Action expresses priorities.” - Mahatma Gandhi
- 2007 September ”James Blish told me I had the worst case of ‘said bookism’ (that is, using every word except said to indicate dialogue). He told me to limit the verbs to said, replied, asked, and answered and only when absolutely necessary.”
- Anne McCaffrey
- 2007 August ”What’s the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.” – Dorothy Allison
- 2007 July ”Isaac gave good advice to authors. . . . [H]e sent me his two laws of writing: 1. Thou shall finish what thou startest. 2. Thou shalt not judge thyself.” - Janet Jeppson Asimov,
_Notes for a Memoir on Isaac Asimov, Life, and Writing_
- 2007 June ”A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.” – Jerry Seinfeld
- 2007 May ”The important thing [in writing memoir], is not the life, but the meaning extracted from it.” – Ellen Boneparth
- 2007 April ”Of course the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you–if you don’t play, you can’t win.” – Robert Heinlein, science fiction author (1907 – 1988)
- 2007 March ”No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” – Robert Frost
- 2007 February ”Can’t Think, Brain Dumb, Inspiration Won’t Come! Poor Ink, Bum Pen, Best Wishes, Amen.” - Unknown
- 2007 January ”Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.” – Bernard Malamud, interviewed for _The Writer’s Desk_ by Jill Krementz
- 2006 December ”The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.”
– Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1902-1903
- 2006 November ”I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I really meant.” - Robert McCloskey
- 2006 October ”No one can help you if you’re stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work’s possibilities.” - Annie Dillard
- 2006 September In baseball you only get three swings and you’re out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you’ll hit the ball. - Neil Simon
- 2006 August ”Just get it down on paper, and then we’ll see what to do about it.”
– Maxwell Perkins
- 2006 July ”I wrote from a sense of need. I needed something to do. You can’t just sleep all day long.”
- Snoopy
- 2006 June ”Be regular and orderly in your life lke a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.” – Gustave Flaubert
- 2006 May ”Wear the old coat and buy the new book.” – Austin Phelps
- 2006 April ”The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.” – William Goldman
- 2006 March ”Anyone who believes you can’t change history has never tried to write his memoirs.”
- David Ben Gurion
- 2006 February ”When action grows unprofitable, gather information;
when information grows unprofitable, sleep.”
- Ursula K. Le Guin
- 2006 January ”The first draft of anything is shit.” – Ernest Hemingway
- 2005 December ”If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I’d type a little faster.”
- Isaac Asimov
- 2005 November ”I learned to make my mind large, like the universe is large, so there is room for paradoxes.”
-Maxine Hong Kingston
- 2005 October ”Action expresses priorities.” – Mahatma Gandhi
- 2005 September ”Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the only thing you have to offer.”
– Barbara Kingsolver
- 2005 August ”The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.”
- Ellen Goodman, American journalist (1941 – )
- 2005 July ”A writer’s mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head.” – Ethel Wilson
- 2005 June ”I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into cream?” – Katherine Patterson
- 2005 May ”Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time. . . The wait is simply too long.” – Leonard Bernstein
- 2005 April ”I never gained control of my mind – how do you dominate an ocean? – but I began to form a relationship with it.” – Natalie Goldberg in Thunder & Lightning
- 2005 March ”Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.” – H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
- 2005 February ”I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.” – Dorothy Allison.
- 2005 January ”To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are.”
- Sholem Asch (1880-1957) Yiddish novelist and dramatist
- 2004 December ”Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein
- 2004 November ”Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor. The enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.”
- Anne LaMott from Bird by Bird
- 2004 October ”To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers.
One who does not vote has no right to complain.” – Louis L’Amour
- 2004 September ”I knew I had to write the truth. We feel a tremendous relief when someone tells the truth.”
- Natalie Goldberg, commenting on her new memoir,
The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely to Truth
- 2004 August ”I’d rather be a failure at something I enjoy than a success at something I hate.”
- George Burns
- 2004 July ”Everybody can write; writers can’t do anything else.”
- Mignon Mclaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook
- 2004 June ”The middle of every successful project looks like a disaster.”
- R.M. Kanton
- 2004 May ”. . . out of the mountains that you write some molehills will be published.”
- Brenda Ueland (1891 – 1985) If You Want to Write
- 2004 April ”An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.”
- Charles de Montesquieu (1689 – 1755)
- 2004 March ”You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
- Jack London
- 2004 February ”Never hope more than you work.”
- Beryl Markham quoting her father in West with the Night
- 2004 January ”Show me your original face before you were born.” – Zen Koan
- 2003 December ”What no wife [or husband] of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out a window.”
- Burton Rascoe
- 2003 November ”Structure is everything.”
- Natalie Goldberg
- 2003 October ”I’m not a good shot, but I shoot often.” – Theodore Roosevelt
- 2003 September ”I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on.”
- Rita Dove
- 2003 August ”I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.”
- Don DeLillo
- 2003 July ”. . . [writing] is your friend. It will never desert you, though you may desert it many times. The writing process is a constant source of life and vitality.” - Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones
- 2003 June ”The faster I write the better my output. If I’m going slow I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.”
- 2003 May ”I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
- Oscar Wilde
- 2003 April ”Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.”
-Cyril Connolly
- 2003 March ”One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
- 2003 February ”You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts.” – Nikki Giovanni
- 2003 January The first issue of WRITE (now) NEWSLETTER.
