Reads for Writers: The Writer's Life edited by Carol Edgarian and Tom Jenks

From Kate’s Writing Crate…

          Writers need inspiration to create any good piece of work, but sometimes we need inspiration to continue writing at all.

The Writer’s Life: Intimate Thoughts on Work, Love, Inspiration, and Fame From the Diaries of the World’s Greatest Writers, edited by Carol Edgarian and Tom Jenks, is a book you can pick up and open randomly or choose a topic to hone in on what you need. Either way, inspiration is but a moment away.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

                                      --Theodore Roethke (p. 22)

The work is not a thing that we make, but an already-made thing              which we discover.

                                      --Thornton Wilder (p. 25)

Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.

                                      --Raymond Chandler (p. 32)

Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all.

                                      --Leo Tolstoy (p. 45)

I often think that the best writing is done after you’ve forgotten what you wanted to say, but end up putting something down anyway just as though it were the actual evidence of your original intention.

                                      --Clarence Major (p. 50)

Because one has written other books does not mean the next becomes any easier. Each book in fact becomes a tabula rasa; from book to book I seem to forget how to get characters in and out of rooms—a far more difficult task than the nonwriter might think.

                                      --John Gregory Dunne (p. 62)

Training to be a writer is a slow and continuous process, with time off for human behavior.

                                      --Marie-Elise (p. 67)

If thou art a writer, write as if thy time were short, for it is indeed short at the longest.

                                      --Henry David Thoreau (p. 76)

A poet told me that when her little boys were small she used to put her typewriter in the playpen and sit there and work while they tore up the house around her. Of course, she is an exceptionally energetic and resourceful person.

                                      --Ellen Gilchrist (p. 137)

          To write is an entertainment I put on for myself.

                                      --Jean Cocteau (p. 141)



Word count for the week of June 11-17 was 7,128.