TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "writing"
“There are no stats programs here. There is no like button.”
Michele Catalano writes about moving back to her blog hosted at her original domain, not because Yahoo bought Tumblr, but because she wants to get away from the likes/reblogs as validation trap:
For as long as I have wanted to be a writer – and that’s about 40 long years – there was never any part of that dream that included obsessively checking a page of statistics and judging my self worth by the numbers within. I always wrote for the sheer pleasure of it, from putting that first word down to finishing the final edit, writing has always been a labor of love. Recently, it had become just a labor.
So here I am back at my old domain, the one where I started writing publicly (ok, blogging) in 2001, the one where I started telling my stories to the world. I’m taking the majority of my writing away from tumblr, away from the hearts and reblogs, away from the instant validation. I don’t want to labor anymore. I want to love what I write. I want to love why I write.
There are no stats programs here. There is no like button. I will have no idea how many people will read each post. But I will write and I will learn to love to write again.
I was chatting with Michele on Twitter, and she said, “For the first couple of years I blogged I had no idea how many readers I had. And I was better off for it.” It reminded me of Greil Marcus, talking about the early days of Rolling Stone, when they said, “My God, people are actually paying attention to this. Let’s pretend they aren’t.”
ArtWork: Seeing Inside the Creative Process
Art Work reveals the artistic notetaking habits of an astonishing range of artists, filmmakers, writers, designers, and other creators by granting rare access to the journal pages and other visual materials they use to capture and foster their work.
From Sasha Frere-Jones’ forward:
As artists, we often prefer the note to the final product; it is an object that is ours alone, free of explanatory fuss and ornament. A mundane list next to three pages of earnestly revised text—shouldn’t we have published it just like that?
From Ivan Vartanian’s introduction, the distinction between journal and notebook:
Where the journal is meant to serve as a daily (or intermittent) record of observations and reflections on a life and its experiences, the notebook is meant as a place of work—for solving problems, jotting an idea, figuring a sequence, determining a position, shaping a phrase. Where the journal documents the life of its owner, the notebook documents the life of an artwork or artistic process.
Here’s Tony Kushner, talking about writing by hand:
Most of my best ideas have not been things that I knew I had in my head. I’ve been surprised by them…and it’s always the case that if you just start moving words around on a piece of paper…if you start limbering up your fingers and get going, you will find your way in.
And Richard Hell:
Notebooks, it seems to me sometimes, are the ultimate art form… Notebooks might be as good as art gets in our time.
(images via grain edit)
“Get sick, get well,
Hang around an ink well
Ring bell, hard to tell
If anything is goin’ to sell…”
—Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues
1) Start with a clear, clean idea
2) Lose that idea by caking on notes and research
3) Hack away at the crud until the original idea emerges
(via)
James Salter writes all his novels in notebooks by hand, but before he starts, he writes instructions and advice to himself on the inside flap:
Prominently recorded on the inside cover of Salter’s first notebook for the 1967 novel A Sport and a Pastime is an instructive quote by André Gide: “Write as if this were your only book, your last book. Into it put everything you were saving—everything precious, every scrap of capital, every penny as it were. Don’t be afraid of being left with nothing.” This advice must have been especially poignant for Salter. He succinctly and emphatically reinforces this sentiment within his notebook for Light Years: “SAVE NOTHING.”
