how to “make it as a writer”...

Lynn Steger Strong's advice

Ilka Tampke on writing

„Very few writers are motivated solely by the desire for recognition. It is lovely if it happens, but it cannot be the reason we sit down every day to stare at a screen and be immersed for hours in the soup of our thoughts. Most of us are motivated by the power of an idea, an image, a character, a world, a moral conundrum. This engages our imagination so deeply that we are willing to stay with it for the years it may take to find its most artful expression. (...) The completion of a novel brings an end to the creative relationship we have with our idea, but publication gives it a chance to be sustained in the imagination of readers. This is what fuels a fiction writer: the ongoing life of the ideas we love. The saddest thing about a book failing to reach an audience is not the wound to the ego, but the ending of the conversation. (...) Don’t underrate being underrated.”

Amanda Palmer's inspiration receiver

"As an artist, I've unwittingly prioritized my life to keep the inspiration-receiver in my head tuned to a clear frequency. This both braces me to receive brilliant and clever ideas at any moment and makes me an impractical idiot who admires the beauty, poetry, and irony of the piano about to fall on my head instead of getting out of the damn way.

The songwriter in me struggles like mad when meditating. The rules of my conditioned art-mind say that nothing must stand in the way of a developing idea. When inspiration calls, follow. If I should be struggling with anything in my life, it should be taking that impossibly disciplined step from thought to pen to paper, from seed to full song.

I watch this mental boxing match take place with interest. In one corner sits a meditator, who calmly suggests that good ideas will linger if they are worthwhile. And so what if they don't? The songs are not happening; only sitting is happening. In the other corner paces the crazed composer with the mind specifically cultivated to jump from image to word to melody in an effort to create a work of art that will move her fellow humans. 

(...)

The best songs come like this, the melody and the words landing on the brain's sunlit kitchen table like a singing telegram, a complete and precise little package of information. In that telegram is encoded the entire blueprint for the verses and chorus, a musical strand of DNA. I cannot recognize the words, the length, or even the subject of the song, but I can detect something about how the song will feel when finished. I've always suspected that this glimpse of the whole from the part offers an excellent metaphor for life and death."

(AmandaPalmer, songwriter)

Mary Oliver on the spellbinding power of RHYTHM...

via BrainPickings

Susan Sontag on STORYTELLING...

via BrainPickings :

Love words. Agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

Be serious. Never be cynical. Which doesn’t preclude being funny.

A great writer of fiction both creates — through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through vivid forms — a new world, a world that is unique, individual; and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but is unknown or mis-known by still more people, confined in theirworlds: call that history, society, what you will.

The primary task of a writer is to write well. (And to go on writing well. Neither to burn out nor to sell out.) … Let the dedicated activist never overshadow the dedicated servant of literature — the matchless storyteller.

To write is to know something. What a pleasure to read a writer who knows a great deal.

Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate — and, therefore, improve — our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.

Every writer of fiction wants to tell many stories, but we know that we can’t tell all the stories — certainly not simultaneously. We know we must pick one story, well, one central story; we have to be selective. The art of the writer is to find as much as one can in that story, in that sequence … in that time (the timeline of the story), in that space (the concrete geography of the story).

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once … and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

The work of the novelist is to enliven time, as it is to animate space.

Every fictional plot contains hints and traces of the stories it has excluded or resisted in order to assume its present shape. Alternatives to the plot ought to be felt up to the last moment. These alternatives constitute the potential for disorder (and therefore of suspense) in the story’s unfolding.

Endings in a novel confer a kind of liberty that life stubbornly denies us: to come to a full stop that is not death and discover exactly where we are in relation to the events leading to a conclusion.

The pleasure of fiction is precisely that it moves to an ending. And an ending that satisfies is one that excludes. Whatever fails to connect with the story’s closing pattern of illumination the writer assumes can be safely left out of the account.

A novel is a world with borders. For there to be completeness, unity, coherence, there must be borders. Everything is relevant in the journey we take within those borders. One could describe the story’s end as a point of magical convergence for the shifting preparatory views: a fixed position from which the reader sees how initially disparate things finally belong together.

To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.

To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.

When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world.

The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention — a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits but whose limits can be stretched.

But perhaps the beginning of wisdom, and humility, is to acknowledge, and bow one’s head, before the thought, the devastating thought, of the simultaneity of everything, and the incapacity of our moral understanding — which is also the understanding of the novelist — to take this in.

A young writer's story of dreams and debts

lived and described by Emily Gould