Notes on Creativity
Quote
Write to think. Don’t try to know where you’re going before you start writing, but write to find out what you think, or find the story you need to tell. Never expect that a particular time-unit of writing will produce a given number of publishable words. You must learn to think of your writing time as a period of discovery, in which you find out what you think, or what images and rhythms tend to emerge from your mind, or where a story seems to want to go. If you focus on discovery, then something worth sharing with others will emerge, in its own way and on its own schedule. But that’s not the kind of thing that can be forced. Allow yourself the freedom to explore.
Alan Jacobs, Snakes and Ladders
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There seems to be among teachers an accepted, albeit unwritten canon for commenting on student texts. This uniform code of commands, requests, and pleadings demonstrates that the teacher holds a license for vagueness while the student is commanded to be specific.
“Responding to Student Writing” by Nancy Sommers, master of the sick burn
PREACH, TOBY
From the introduction to THE VINTAGE BOOK OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN SHORT STORIES by Tobias Wolff:
“As it happens, many of the stories in this book confront difficult
material: violence, sickness, alcoholism, sexual exploitation, marital
breakup. Well, so do we. I have never been able to understand the
complaint that a story is ‘depressing’ because of its subject matter.
What depresses me are stories that don’t seem to know these things go
on, or hide them in resolute chipperness; ‘witty’ stories, in which
every problem is an occasion for a joke, ‘upbeat’ stories that flog you
with transcendence. Please. We’re grown-ups now, we get to stay in the
kitchen when the other grown-ups talk.
(photo credit: Syracuse University, pic of Wolff from 1984)
“Far from being
depressed, my own reaction to stories like these is exhilaration, both
at the honesty and the art. The art gives shape to what the honesty
discovers, and allows us to face what in truth we were already afraid of
anyway. It lets us know we’re not alone.”
AMEN
An anonymous fear submitted
to Deep Dark Fears –
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Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland
Sky over Edinburgh
Twelfth Night, Globe Theater, One Moment of Brilliance
Near the end of the first act, the
tight-ass steward Malvolio gets tricked by his fellow servants. They write
him a fake letter, supposedly from the lady of the house professing her love
for him. The letter directs him to do a bunch of stupid shit, and he’s
completely taken in. He reads the letter out loud to the audience, rejoicing in his good fortune—She loves
me!—and it’s supposed to be funny, and it is funny, but then the actor pauses. She searches the sky (Malvolio
is played by Katy Owen in this production) and shouts, “I am happy!” Her voice is raw and broken, and a laugh gets stuck in my throat. All at once, I see how
vulnerable Malvolio is. How exposed. How human. How unhappy he had been, and
how destroyed he will be once he learns the truth. The line hits me like a thunderclap—I am happy!—and I’m wiping away tears at intermission.
Maybe
you’re never moved so much as when you don’t expect to be moved. Maybe I was
surprised to find myself playing the fool, gulled by comedy, only to be caught
by this quick hook of poignancy. All I know for sure is that I’ll never hear a
declaration of happiness in the same way again.
Joy is the thing with a bicycle bell.