apoetreflects:

“A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being.”

—Robert Frost

(via journalofanobody)

poetbabble:

It seems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast that that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysteries. The problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit this power.

- Louise Glück, excerpted from her essay “Disruption, Hesitation, Silence” from Proofs & Theories

(via apoetreflects)

(As Foster Wallace himself says, writers do need to know everything!)

newyorker:

David Foster Wallace’s Tax Classes

The author hardly pulled these abstruse accounting complexities from thin air. Last week, after speaking at the David Foster Wallace Symposium at the University of Texas at Austin, I looked at Wallace’s own accounting-class notes with this new excerpt in mind. (Wallace attended tax courses as research for “The Pale King”; those notes make up a part of his archive, which is housed at the university’s Harry Ransom Center.) These papers, which are mostly related to in-class lectures and problem-set solutions, occasionally became a place for Wallace to observe his classmates, who were taking the classes for credit toward a degree. “ACCOUNTING STUDENTS ARE INCREDIBLY ORGANIZED NOTE-TAKERS,” reads one jotting that found its way into “The Pale King.”

That same page of Wallace’s notebook also contains what looks like a plea regarding the author’s own boredom: “God please help me—Pain, captain.” The mood suggested here is evoked by another unnamed examiner in the Hovatter scene, who at one point “made as if to cover her ears and asked whether please might they be spared listening to this all again.” Submitting to the grind of tax scholarship wasn’t merely a method by which Wallace tried to empathize with the more distractible I.R.S. agents, though. He was also working to understand tax dodges. “An avoidance scheme, perhaps?” Syvlanshine asks the lunch crowd in the new paperback scene, regarding Hovatter’s proposed year-long TV-watching project. “Passive losses?” he then adds, as a reference to a type of deduction that can be used to offset passive gains—but which results in a penalty if abused. During a class that Wallace described in his notes as a “Scam-Fest,” he scribbled the phrase: “PASSIVE a big word for IRS.”

- Last week, after speaking at the David Foster Wallace Symposium at the University of Texas at Austin, Seth Colter Walls looked at Wallace’s accounting-class notes. Four “previously unpublished scenes” accompany the paperback edition of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, “The Pale King,” which arrives in bookstores this week.

For more of Wallace’s notes, and Walls’s thoughts on them:http://nyr.kr/ISFV2C

(via wwnorton)

karenfelloutofbedagain:

Lots of things might happen. That’s the thing about writers. They’re unpredictable. They might bring you eggs in bed for breakfast, or they might all but ignore you for days. They might bring you eggs in bed at three in the morning. Or they might wake you up for sex…

therecklessabandon:

“III What Gives Us Our Names” (back cover) a collection of prose, by Alvin Pang

(via teachingliteracy)

amandaonwriting:

“Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Begin with an individual and you find that you have created a type; begin with a type and you find that you have created—nothing.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out.” ~ Charles Bukowski

“Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry.” ~ Muriel Rukeyser

“A short story must have single mood and every sentence must build towards it.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” ~ Saul Bellow

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” ~ T. S. Eliot

“Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.” ~ Stephen King

“Good fiction is made of what is real, and reality is difficult to come by.” ~ Ralph Ellison

“The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That’s not true with non-fiction.” ~ Tom Wolfe

“You cannot write well without data.” ~ George Higgins

“Listen, then make up your own mind.” ~ Gay Talese

“Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

“Write without pay until somebody offers pay; if nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.” ~ Mark Twain

(via teachingliteracy)

(Source: decrepito, via apostrophe9)

(strangely, this might be the reason why I sometimes like staring at caged pets for no good reason whatsoever. Or staring at strangers in the mall, for that matter - what happens when we’re caged from desire.)

apoetreflects:

Exercise to Quiet the Voices in One’s Head When Working on a Draft:

“Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up.  Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse.  Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar.  Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar,  And so on.  Drop in any high-maintenance parental units, any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head.  Then put the lid on, and watch al these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel [badly] because you won’t do what they want—won’t give them more money, won’t be more successful, won’t see them more often.

Then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the jar.  Turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices.  Then turn it all the way down and watch the frantice mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you.  Leave it down, and get back to your first draft.”

—Annie Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Anchor Books, 1994)

(via silentfrenzies)