Goals are just failures you haven’t experienced yet.
Tom McAllister on @Book_Fight
Notes on Creativity
I’m tired. I’ve been tired for a while. I can’t (or maybe don’t want to) do as much shit as I’ve been doing. I’m not burned out, exactly; it’s more like a brownout. And it might be the best thing for me.
If I have less energy, I’ll do fewer things. If I do fewer things, I’ll have to make better, more intentional choices about what those things should be. Intentional choices, too, about what to neglect. If I’m tired enough, I’ll pull back, clear some time and headspace for the core missions, whatever those turn out to be.
Here’s what I’ve figured out so far:
I don’t have to be King of email.
I don’t have to be the service star at my school.
Facebook can fuck off, at least during the week.
I need to kick ass at family-ing, writing, reading, and teaching. Those are my core missions. More importantly, maybe, those are enough.
Annotations gone wild.
My ten-year-old does not care about your eyes.
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Many people ask for advice. And I love giving advice. But often I can tell they’re asking for the shortcut. What’s the way around all the work? And I don’t want to give shortcuts… It can make you feel stodgy, it can make you seem elitist in some way. And I don’t that’s the argument at all. In a way we’re all self-published. We’re all doing the work we can to get our stuff out there. But to me those ladders are there not to keep you away but to make you a better writer. And that’s what I always say: you owe yourself a lot of rejection letters, you owe yourself a lot of missed opportunities and failure. Because that’s how you’ll get good.
Jess Walter (via mttbll)
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It had the feel of a scene from a novel written by an earnest realist who was more concerned with presenting an amalgamation of naturalistic details that fit together plausibly than with telling a story that wouldn’t bore the fuck out of the reader.
Lev Grossman, sneaking some writing criticism into The Magician King
Gay In Theory
Last spring, I invited a guy to my Indiana college fraternity’s formal. I realized, though, that my fraternity brothers had never actually seen me with another guy. To them, I was “gay in theory.” Would they be as accepting when they saw me…
The feeling you get when a former student publishes something in HuffPo: Pride so strong it feels like a gut cramp.
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Doing and making are acts of hope, and as that hope grows, we stop feeling overwhelmed by the troubles of the world. We remember that we—as individuals and groups—can do something about those troubles.
Sister Corita Kent, Learning by Heart
Marking papers before I have my coffee this past Sunday morning, I come up with gems like this for my students. We call these “teaching stories,” people.
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I would say I’ve been lucky in my friends if I didn’t understand how hard you sometimes have to fight to hold onto them. Gary King knew this from the beginning. It isn’t the beer he’s fighting for, really. The beer—of course—is only a symbol. It’s a stand in for a feeling that he can never get back. The feeling that he and his friends are in this together. The feeling that the night will never end. The feeling that they are indestructible. The assurance that they will never get old, lose touch, have families, lose families, and die. Naive as it is, impossible as it is, can you really blame him? Isn’t that something worth fighting for, dying for, tearing the head off of a robot and bathing in its cobalt blood for?
Matt Sailor, “Great Moments In Cinematic Drinking: The World’s End”
I keep telling people “You have to see The World’s End.”
And they say “Oh yeah, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz were great.”
And then I say “NO, YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND.”
(via embfitz)