Stolen Lines - Of Wistful Hopefulness

If it comes out of your soul like a rocket.

Burn it out to the end.

 I forget the rest. . .

Ah yes . . .

Everything will be okay in the end.
And if its not okay, its not the end.

Anais Nin, On Writing and Growing

OK.  A few more quotes and such to fill this pause, before I get back to the business of writing.

I came across this quote today in an article about the difference between our conception of what our future will be and the reality of what our future is when it arrives*:

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”

                                                                                   - Anais Nin

She also has so many wonderful nuggests on love, life, and also on writing:



* My favorite thought, after reading that article: We're all like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future, holding that Polaroid picture. The one with the future versions of the people we love fading away because of the steps we take or don't take in our present or our past.  Except, its each of us in the picture. And we have to take action in the present to keep ourselves from disappearing in our own futures. . .

Anthony Trollope - On Poetry (Dedicated to My Uncle Jack)

"In this world things are beautiful only because they are not quite seen, or not perfectly understood. Poetry is precious chiefly because it suggests more than it declares."

                                                                                        - Anthony Trollope

Storytelling: Why We Write

Below is an excerpt from Neil Gaiman's acceptance speech for winning the Newbury Award for The Graveyard Book.

I've admired Gaiman from afar, through quotes and tidbits, for quite some time.

It's time to start reading.
It's time to start telling new stories.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

More...from the same speech:

"I've been writing now for a quarter of a century.

When people tell me that my stories helped them through the death of a loved one--a child, perhaps, or a parent--or helped them cope with a disease, or a personal tragedy; or when they tell me that my tales made them become readers, or gave them a career; when they show me images or words from my books tattooed on their skin as monuments or memorials to moments that were so important to them they needed to take them with them everywhere ... when these things have happened, as they have, over and over, my tendency is to be polite and grateful, but ultimately to dismiss them as irrelevant.

I did not write the stories to get people through the hard places and the difficult times. I didn't write them to make readers of nonreaders. I wrote them because I was interested in the stories, because there was a maggot in my head, a small squirming idea I needed to pin to the paper and inspect, in order to find out what I thought and felt about it. I wrote them because I wanted to find out what happened next to people I had made up. I wrote them to feed my family.

So I felt almost dishonorable accepting people's thanks. I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it.

And I remembered. I would not be the person I am without the authors who made me what I am--the special ones, the wise ones, sometimes just the ones who got there first.

It's not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It's the most important thing there is.

I was, as I said, twenty-five years old, and I had an idea for a book and I knew it was a real one.

I tried writing it, and realized that it was a better idea than I was a writer. So I kept writing, but I wrote other things, learning my craft. I wrote for twenty years until I thought that I could write The Graveyard Book--or at least, that I was getting no better.

I wanted the book to be composed of short stories, because. The Jungle Book was short stories. And I wanted it to be a novel, because it was a novel in my head. The tension between those two things was both a delight and a heartache as a writer.

I wrote it as best I could. That's the only way I know how to write something. It doesn't mean it's going to be any good. It just means you try. And, most of all, I wrote the story that I wanted to read.
It took me too long to begin, and it took me too long to finish. And then, one night in February, I was writing the last two pages.

In the first chapter I had written a doggerel poem and left the last two lines unfinished. Now it was time to finish it, to write the last two lines.

So I did. The poem, I learned, ended:

Face your life

Its pain, its pleasure,

Leave no path untaken.

And my eyes stung, momentarily. It was then, and only then, that I saw clearly for the first time what I was writing. I had set out to write a book about a childhood it was Bod's childhood, and it was in a graveyard, but still, it was a childhood like any other; I was now writing about being a parent, and the fundamental most comical tragedy of parenthood: that if you do your job properly, if you, as a parent, raise your children well, they won't need you anymore. If you did it properly, they go away. And they have lives and they have families and they have futures.

I sat at the bottom of the garden, and I wrote the last page of my book, and I knew that I had written a book that was better than the one I had set out to write. Possibly a book better than I am.

You cannot plan for that. Sometimes you work as hard as you can on something, and still the cake does not rise. Sometimes the cake is better than you had ever dreamed.

And then, whether the work was good or bad, whether it did what you hoped or it failed, as a writer you shrug, and you go on to the next thing, whatever the next thing is.

That's what we do."

Who Needs Books Anyway?

"Some people might tell you that books are no longer necessary now that we have the internet. Don’t believe them. Books help us know other people, know how the world works, and, in the process, know ourselves more deeply in a way that has nothing to with what you read them on and everything to do with the curiosity, integrity and creative restlessness you bring to them.

Books build bridges to the lives of others, both the characters in them and your countless fellow readers across other lands and other eras, and in doing so elevate you and anchor you more solidly into your own life. They give you a telescope into the minds of others, through which you begin to see with ever greater clarity the starscape of your own mind.

And though the body and form of the book will continue to evolve, its heart and soul never will. Though the telescope might change, the cosmic truths it invites you to peer into remain eternal like the Universe."

                                                                  -- Maria Popova, Does My Goldfish Know Who I Am?

Winter Songs in Summer

"This is my winter song to you.
The storm is coming soon,
it rolls in from the sea.

My voice a beacon in the night.
My words will be your light,
to carry you to me. . . .

I still believe in summer days.
The seasons always change
and life will find a way."

                               -- Winter Song, Sara Bareilles

Post Storm v.3

The wet heat presses against us.
And a charged blackness, darker than night, oozes across the sky.

The clouds wrap us up, and hold us underwater.
Breathless and panicked, our eyes go wide.











But afterwards, sunlight.
Afterwards, there is an afterwards.

Post Storm v.2

The damp heat presses down and envelops us.

Electric whips singe the clouds that swirl through the night sky.

The darkness tumbles and spreads.









But afterwards.
The sunshine survived.

Afterwards, there was an afterwards.

.

Post Storm

   Lightning lashes out in electric strokes.

   Clouds swirl over dark skies.

   The damp heat presses downward. It envelops.

                                     . . .

   Afterwards, there was an afterwards.

   (The sunshine survived.)

One of Those Days

"Some days are dry, some days are leaky
Some days come clean, other days are sneaky.
Some days take less, but most days take more
Some slip through your fingers and on to the floor.
Some days you're quick, but most days you're speedy
Some days you use more force than is necessary.
Some days just drop in on us.
Some days are better than others.
Some days it all adds up
And what you've got is enough.
Some days are better than others."

                                              -- Some Days Are Better Than Others, U2