Dear Blog:
I love you I hate you, you are my pretty hunchbacked twin. I decorate you with flowers. I jot notes and put them in your pockets. I button your jacket and comb your hair.
Sometimes I wish you were dead because you annoy me and take up my time. But I gave you life, my little monster, and I dote on you too. You have a good memory where mine is poor. You are nicer and plainer and better than I am. You look on the bright side and try to do what’s right.
But you are too easy: anybody can find you and have you. You give away the flowers and the nickels in your pockets. You are vague, shy, smiling, stunted. You repeat yourself and others. You duck and cramp to fit. Are you honest?
Come here. Stand up straight. Today I am going to tattoo your pale skin with good words about writing. Hold still. Stop giggling; I know it tickles. Now go read yourself in the mirror and learn something, my sweet stupid hopeless Blog.
Love,
Dr. Blogenstein
Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable. - Francis Bacon
The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. - André Gide
One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. - Hart Crane
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. - Ernest Hemingway
Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. - Anton Chekhov
Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. - Orson Scott Card
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. - Mark Twain
Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself. - Franz Kafka
The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new. - Samuel Johnson
When you are describing,
A shape, or sound, or tint;
Don't state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things,
With a sort of mental squint.
- Charles Dodgson
Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. - Samuel Johnson
Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. - Colette
An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. - Gustave Flaubert
Easy reading is damn hard writing. - Nathaniel Hawthorne
If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing. - Benjamin Franklin
I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. - James Michener
The wastebasket is a writer's best friend. - Isaac Bashevis Singer
Write without pay until somebody offers to pay. - Mark Twain
Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals. - Don Delillo
Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.... - Denise Levertov
Don't get it right, just get it written. - James Thurber
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public. - Winston Churchill
Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money. - Moliere
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. - Annie Dillard
A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others. - William Faulkner
I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice. - Mark Twain
He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink. - John Ray
Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph. - Benjamin Franklin
Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity. - Gustave Flaubert
One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds. - Alfred Kazin
True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance. - Alexander Pope
