| Seducing the Demon | Erica Jong | Casual | Libgen.is |
| There is in writing - or any creative work - a kind of fuck-you impulse. Part of the energy comes from sheer rebelliousness. I'll show you! a writer says. I am not who you think I am. Sometimes you have to get mad just to begin. You think you are all alone in this - but battalions of dead writers who faced the same challenge are shouting in your ears. (Margaret Atwood calls writing "negotiating with the dead.") You have to drown them out when they keep you from hearing yourself. They are alternately encouraging and stifling. You have to invent a voice that will make all their voices obsolete. You can't do this without grit, aggression, a kind of madness. No one really asks for a new book, but you need to write it. |
| The Poet's Companion | Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux | Casual | Libgen.is |
| We've been told again and again to write about what we know, but we don't trust that advice. We think our lives are dull, ordinary, boring. Other people have lives worthy of poetry, but not us. And what are the "great" poems about? The big subjects: death, desire, the nature of existence. They ask the big questions: Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? We find it difficult to believe those subjects, those questions, can be explored and contained in a poem about working at a fast food restaurant, a poem about our best friend, a poem about washing the dishes, tarring the roof, or taking a bus across town. |
| Ordinary Genius | Kim Addonizio | Casual | Libgen.is |
| ...and yet I sometimes find myself wondering what there is to write about, and whether I have anything left to say. If you sometimes feel like this, it's good to go back to the evidence of the external world, to pay attention to the music of what happens. The world won't ever fail you. Even if you feel bored, if you think that nothing is happening, it only takes a little checking in with the evidence to prove you wrong. |
| The Artist's Way | Julia Cameron | Casual | Libgen.is |
| An artist must have downtime, time to do nothing. Defending our right to such time takes courage, conviction, and resiliency. Such time, space, and quiet will strike our family and friends as a withdrawal from them. It is. For an artist, withdrawal is necessary. Without it, the artist in us feels vexed, angry, out of sorts. If such deprivation continues, our artist becomes sullen, depressed, hostile. We eventually became like cornered animals, snarling at our family and friends to leave us alone and stop making unreasonable demands. |
| The Writing Life | Annie Dillard | Casual | Libgen.is |
| One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. |
| The Wave in the Mind | Ursula K. Le Guin | Casual | Libgen.is |
| But writers, especially fiction writers, are always making up names. Do they confuse themselves with their characters? The question isn't totally frivolous. I think most novelists are aware at times of containing multitudes, of having an uncomfortably acute sympathy for Multiple Personality Disorder, of not entirely subscribing to the commonsense notion of what constitutes a self. |
| Big Magic | Elizabeth Gilbert | Casual | Libgen.is |
| Your Art Will Save Your Life | Beth Pickens | Casual | Libgen.is |
| You will make work that has enormous impact on someone. You may never meet or hear from them, but someone will encounter a work you make and it will do something transformative for them. They will be grateful you exist, thankful you made the work and let it be out in the world. In order to get there, to let your work reach the people who need and want to experience it, you have to be of service to it. You have to make it, yes, and you also have to support its life after it's no longer your private experience. |
| For Writers Only | Sophy Burnham | Casual | |
| ...we cannot ask for recognition. It's not the artist's place. All we can do is work with all our hearts. What happens is not our responsibility. |
| A Poetry Handbook | Mary Oliver | Casual | Libgen.is |
| To interrupt the writer from the line of thought is to wake the dreamer from the dream. The dreamer cannot enter that dream, precisely as it was unfolding, ever again because the line of thought is more than that: it is a line of feeling as well. Until interruption occurs, this feeling is as real as the desk on which the poet is working. |
| A Writer's Guide to Characterization | Victoria Lynn Schmidt | Casual | Libgen.is |
| The Amazon can help the Father's Daughter get in touch with her female power. She can show the Father's Daughter that a woman can be whole unto herself. She can teach her to honor her cycles, something the Father's Daughter may want to suppress with pills. |
| So You Want to Write | Marge Piercy | Casual | Libgen.is |
| A novel or a memoir takes time to read. Therefore, the art of the novel and the art of the memoir involve much persuasion. You must convince the reader to start reading and continue reading. You must persuade her not to put the book down on page one or page one hundred. Not to skip. Fiction and memoir and indeed any kind of narrative requires constant persuasion. |
| Ursula K. Le Guin | Casual | Libgen.is |
| Most children enjoy the sound of language for its own sake. They wallow in repetitions and luscious word-sounds and the crunch and slither of onomatopoeia; they fall in love with musical or impressive words and use them in all the wrong places. Some writers keep this primal interest in and love for the sounds of language. Others “outgrow” their oral/aural sense of what they're reading or writing. That's a dead loss. |
| Victoria Lynn Schmidt | Casual | Libgen.is |
| Her friendships with women are the most important relationships she has, but they are few and far between due to her androgynous attitudes. |
| Mastering Suspense, Structure, and Plot | Jane Cleland | Casual | Libgen.is |
| This sense of rightness doesn't merely apply to exotic or dramatic situations. Your settings must include only the kinds of places your character would go. Let's say you have a character who is revealed to be depressed in the first chapter; her only solace is hiking. A hundred pages later, when that woman is told to get herself together by a mean-spirited, know-it-all cousin, she retreats into herself and, as soon as she can, escapes onto a nearby hiking trail. When a feral dog attacks her, your readers won't find her presence in the woods contrived - you've previously planted the seed that makes her current reaction seem inevitable. |
| American Originality | Louise Gluck | Academic | Libgen.is |
| If the dog and the garden are not changed permanently by perception, to what end, for what reason, are they watched so carefully? They are watched, I think, because for Kenyon they are all potentially teachers. Her modesty is the modesty of the good student, who sees how shortsighted it would be to cut herself off from resources. There is nothing here of the cloying sycophant. In this system, everything teaches, but not everyone is capable of learning. |
| Proofs & Theories | Louise Gluck | Academic | Hyphanet |
| And the sting the poet may suffer differs from the risks of more immediate exposure: the ostensibly exposed self, the author, is, by the time of publication, out of range, out of existence, in fact. |
| Writing as a Path to Awakening | Albert DeSilver | Casual | Libgen.is |
| Pablo Picasso reportedly said, "Good artists copy; great artists steal." Twentieth-century poet and essayist T.S. Eliot expands on that for poets (and all writers) when he writes, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." |
| No Plot? No Problem! | Chris Baty | Casual | Libgen.is |
| As literature, they were ugly as sin. As experiments, though, they were packed with a useful array of wrong turns, misguided decisions, and shameful flops. From those experiments, I discovered copious amounts about what I shouldn't be writing. This allowed me to spend my subsequent novels in the happy pursuit of what I should. |