Quotes - E.B. White

I've been on a non-fiction kick lately so I pored through The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, compiled by Phillip Lopate.

Here are a few words pulled from E.B. White's wonderful essay, The Ring of Time:

For the writers among us (or maybe for anyone, really)

It has been ambitious and plucky of me to attempt to describe what is indescribable, and I have failed, as I knew I would. But I have discharged my duty to society; and besides, a writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him.

For everyone

The only sense that is common, in the long run, is the sense of change - and we all instinctively avoid it, and object to the passage of time, and would rather have none of it.

I've glossed over a lot of the essay, especially regarding the African-American Civil Rights Movement (which has, apparently, been left out of some of the reproductions found online).  Overall, the essay is masterfully written, and well worth reading in its entirety.

Oh, and "plucky" is a word that needs to grow into regular usage. Who's with me?

Just a Quote

This isn't filler, I swear! It's just something that I feel is important.

So, here it is, from Ray Bradbury's essay, "Zen in the Art of Writing:"

What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn't it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, "That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!"

Then and only then is writing worthwhile.

My conscious mind is trying to figure out whether this quote applies to me. Still, my subconscious felt a little giddy when I first read it.

Warming up to/with Reading

So I was stuck again today. I had a lot of time on my hands, sitting in UCR's Rivera Library at around 2:30 pm. I needed to write and I made a conscious effort, after class, to claim one of the library's computers. Still, I couldn't come up with anything to write or come up with the words to write down. I was confused. How do I write something, again? I kept asking myself this question for another ten minutes.

I had to give up on trying to figure it out because it was frustrating me again (remember the snowball). So, I went on the internet. I found and read a story by Louise Erdrich called "The Reptile Garden" and was fascinated by her use of sensory details, particularly in a make-out scene where even the steel pipes were given the modesty of clothing, in the form of "powdery bandages of asbestos." Hey, I can write that, I thought, and I proceeded to write a page of my story.

Saul Bellow said that "A writer is a reader moved to emulation." Point taken. After I wrote my page, I went home and felt stuck again. I then read an essay by Janet Fitch (which I'm pulled from Writers Workshop in a Book, edited by Alan Cheuse and Lisa Alvarez) called "Coming to Your Senses," where she stressed about describing with the five senses. Inspired, I wrote another half page of some pretty nice description.

I have a page and half of my story right now. At least that's a start. And I'll definitely remember to read more often.