Chickens roosting. But also angsty.

21 Lies Writers Tell Themselves

1. Underwear is definitely pants.
2. All you need to be a writer is talent.
3. My talent and its demands protect me from the responsibilities of normal people.
4. I’m almost done.
5. When I’m not engaged in the process of writing, I’m thinking about writing, therefore I am writing.
6. My writer’s block protects me from humiliating myself.
7. I don’t care that my frenemy from grad school got a million dollars for that literary crossover novel.
8. I don’t care that I got a million dollars for my literary crossover novel. I’m going to just keep it real. This doesn’t change anything for me. You know.
9. I don’t need to back up my computer.
10. Publishing this book will change my life.
11. I’m not going to get caught up in all that publicity stuff.
12. I’m only on social media because I have to be to promote X.
13. I’m only going to go on Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr for a few more minutes.
14. I need a MFA.
15. I don’t need a MFA (and no one else does either).
16. If you put something on the Internet, no one will read it.
17. If you put something on the Internet, everyone will read it.
18. Writing for free for that website will help me get my name out there.
19. I don’t need a contract for this.
20. I don’t need an agent for this.
21. My agent is ignoring me!

likeafieldmouse:

Alejandro Guijarro - Momentum (2010-12)

“The artist travelled to the great quantum mechanics institutions of the world and, using a large-format camera, photographed blackboards as he found them. Momentum displayed the photographs in life-size. 

Before he walked into a lecture hall Guijarro had no idea what he might find. He began by recording a blackboard with the minimum of interference. No detail of the lecture hall was included, the blackboard frame was removed and we are left with a surface charged with abstract equations. Effectively these are documents. Yet once removed from their institutional beginnings the meaning evolves. The viewer begins to appreciate the equations for their line and form. Color comes into play and the waves created by the blackboard eraser suggest a vast landscape or galactic setting. The formulas appear to illustrate the worlds of Quantum Mechanics. What began as a precise lecture, a description of the physicist’s thought process, is transformed into a canvas open to any number of possibilities.”

1. Cambridge (2011)

2. Stanford (2012)

3. Berkeley I (2012)

4. Berkeley II (2012)

5. Oxford (2011)

(Source: likeafieldmouse, via thehoopoe)

Twelve quotes on the secret of writing. From @AdviceToWriters

I’ll give you the sole secret of short-story writing, and here it is: Rule 1. Write stories that please yourself. There is no rule 2.

O. HENRY

The secret is to start a story near the ending.

CHRIS OFFUT

The secret of successful fiction is a continual slight novelty.

EDMUND GOSSE

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.

MARK TWAIN

People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it.

HARLAN ELLISON

The big secret is the ability to stay in the room.

RON CARLSON

There’s no “magic secret”; writing is like everything else; ten percent inspiration or talent, and ninety percent hard work. Persistence; keeping at it till you get there. As Agnes de Mille said, it means working every day—bored, tired, weary, or with a fever of a hundred and two.

MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It’s not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.

AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS

The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.

EZRA POUND

Composition is a discipline; it forces us to think. If you want to “get in touch with your feelings,” fine—talk to yourself; we all do. But, if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order; give them a purpose; use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down and then cut out the confusing parts.

WILLIAM SAFIRE

A lot of people talk about writing. The secret is to write, not talk.

JACKIE COLLINS

It’s hard to explain how much one can love writing. If people knew how happy it can make you, we would all be writing all the time. It’s the greatest secret of the world.

ANDREA BARRETT


From the seen and not heard file.

“Our country might have been better off if it was still just men voting. There is nothing worse than a bunch of mean, hateful women. They are diabolical in how they can skewer a person.”

—Janis Lane, Central Mississippi Tea Party president, on whether too many male politicians are telling women what to do with their bodies. via MailOnline (via officialssay)

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day…. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

—The New York Times’ Tim Kreider takes down the ‘busy’ trap (via explore-blog)

(Source: , via explore-blog)

I will be on leno wednesday night with Snooki! It should be an interesting evening! I hope she likes zoos and animals!

—Newt Gingrich’s deleted tweet on his upcoming appearance on Jay Leno. (via officialssay)

“Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. And draw you a map of how to find your way back to the right side.” 

Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, 

betterbooktitles:

This week, Better Book Titles turned 2 years old: 5 Million visits, over 400 book titles, and there will soon be a book version! Thank you everyone for the positive feedback and all the great submissions.

I wanted to share a related blog I started with my friend Robert Dean, called Unquotables. Here are some of my favorites.

Happy Fourth of July!

The Princess and the Slave -- How Love Kills in Afghanistan

In Afghanistan, where four-fifths of the population is illiterate, poetry has always had a strong position—especially among women. The Afghan writer and journalist Nushin Arbabzadah writes here a letter to the poet and Princesse Rabia Balkhi, who lived in the 900’s and faced a tragic fate. She fell in love with a slave and was imprisoned by her own brother because of it. She wrote her most famous poem in prison right before she died. She wrote it on the wall with her own blood.