#sarah orne jewett
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It was one of the October days when to breathe the air is like drinking wine, and every touch of the wind against one’s face is a caress.
~Sarah Orne Jewett
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Puede que no solo se ocupara de las dolencias cotidianas de la humanidad, a veces parecía que el amor y el odio, los celos y los vientos desfavorables en el mar pudieran encontrar también su propia cura en las extrañas y asilvestradas plantas del jardín de la señora Todd.
Sarah Orne Jewett, La tierra de los abetos puntiagudos.
#sarah orne jewett#la tierra de los abetos puntiagudos#citas de libros#citas literarias#citas#citas en español
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#rain#rainy#rainy day#rainfall#rainymood#rainy vibes#fall vibes#fall#fall aesthetic#fall rain#rain aesthetic#poem#poetry#in the country of the pointed firs#jean garrigue#sarah orne jewett#cozy#cozy aesthetic#cozy living#cozycore#warm and cozy#cozy cottage#cozymood#cozy fall#cozyreading#cozy rain#soft#city#dream#dreamy
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I bought Sarah Orne Jewett's collected works because I wanted to read about quaint New England life and lighthouses (and wanted to read one of the inspirations for The Lighthouse) but then she just straight up wrote a book about the perfect sapphic summer vacation? You and your bestie hanging out at her dead aunt's seaside house for the summer, making sure to meet every single member of town? Rowing out your boat at night to see the stars you picked out together as children? Going to the circus? Making fun of lectures on "The Elements of Manhood"? Hearing a local fisher tell you about his beloved cat? Finding at the end of the summer that maybe you'd like to imitate the Ladies of Llangollen and remove yourselves from society? All while describing the surrounding nature and scenery and hustle and bustle lovingly?
Everyone should go and read Deephaven, actually.
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The afternoon was like spring, the air was soft and damp, and the buds of the willows had been beguiled into swelling a little...
from A Country Doctor by Sarah Orne Jewett
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New Horror 2022 - Day 30
"The Green Bowl" by Sarah Orne Jewett (1901)
"The English tart is nothing but a pie without a soul."
A lot of stories from this period are people recounting some tale of the supernatural to their friends, sometimes with a little twist thrown in. This one’s fairly light on the twist part and isn’t scary except in a heaviness of the foreknowledge of death sort of way.
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"Crush" by Janet Hetherington, Ronn Sutton, Becka Kinzie, Zakk Saam (2018)
"His eyes are as wild as the sea."
Aye, that’s a Gothic story alright. The foreword by Jacques Nodell that introduces the anthology was actually a really good breakdown of the Gothic literature genre and its trappings. The ending is pretty gruesome but then I think that’s also a tendency in the scary Gothic romances.
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It Follows dir. David Robert Mitchell (2014)
"It is not done with me either."
This movie carried some good word of mouth but had fallen into the bottomless backlog of stuff I needed to watch. A showing at the Roxie prompted me to finally check it out. There was actually a short lecture by author Johanna Isaacson that introduced the movie and let me tell you, I'm always in for a pre-movie presentation to prime the brain for what's to come. The movie itself is great of course, lives up to the hype and left me creeped out. I’ll be walking uneasily and constantly checking my surroundings for days.
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Zombies Ate My Neighbors dev. LucasArts (1993)
"Terror has a new name!”
This is one of those games that’s been in the back of my brain since the 90s as something to complete someday, and the season felt right for it. (It helps that I have a portable device with emulation support so I could cheese through the game with save states and a rewind function.) Now that I’ve completed it, whoof, what a pain in the ass. It can be fun with its horror and sci-fi tropes, but it’s also incredibly difficult. It’s meant to be completed over the course of weeks or months but I don’t have that kinda time. The levels also start to get repetitive, with latter levels essentially serving more challenging remixes of earlier stuff. I’m glad I finally got through it but it’s a tough proposition these days.
#zombies ate my neighbors#lucasarts#video games#it follows#david robert mitchell#gothic tales of haunted love#Janet Hetherington#Ronn Sutton#Becka Kinzie#Zakk Saam#comics#the green bowl#Sarah Orne Jewett#short stories#horror#new horror 2022#horror fiction#johanna isaacson#jacque nodell
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The starlight from one clear, bright star,
The moonlight, faint and white
From the little moon, low in the sky,
Shone in my face on the hill, where I
Have thought of you to-night.
There was just the last of the sunset left,
Pale-yellow in the west,
And a sleepy bobolink flew by,
And dropped into its nest;
And the field was full of daisies,
That nodded, and waved, and bowed;
The wind was so little it could not play
At once with all the crowd,
And the daisies bowed to the star and moon,
And I called you once aloud.
The nearest daisies looked at me
Because they heard me call;
And they told each other what I had said,
Though they did not hear it all.
And I stood there wishing for you,
All alone on the hill;
While far below were the fields asleep,
And above, the sky so still.
In the twilight the daisies were busy,
And they nodded and looked around
At each other, and bowed to begin a dance;
But their feet never moved from the ground.
Oh, the little wind blew, and I watched them
Till I felt like a daisy, too;
And more kept blooming, it seemed to me;
And they knew I thought of you.
The star went higher, and the moon grew bright,
And the sunset was almost lost,
And the trees below looked black as the night,
But the daisies were white like frost;
And the mountains so far, and so blue by day,
Looked dark against the west,
So grave and still in their solemn gloom,
And the world was all at rest.
But the daisies nodded and looked at me,
And still they bowed and played;
Like children in church, they were merry still,
And why should they be afraid?
I looked up at the hills and down at the fields
All dim with shadows, dear;
Then looked at the sky, and I hid my face,
For its light grew strangely clear.
The flowers were so white that they dazzled me,
And the wind blew against my face;
And the stars seemed nearer than lights below,
While I stood in that lonely place.
A Night In June by Sarah Orne Jewett
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It was one of the October days when to breathe the air is like drinking wine, and every touch of the wind against one’s face is a caress. ~Sarah Orne Jewett
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"It was one of the October days when to breathe the air is like drinking wine, and every touch of the wind against one’s face is a caress." ~Sarah Orne Jewett
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THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY
based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … February 19
1902 – F.O. (Francis Otto) Matthiessen was an educator, scholar and literary critic influential in the fields of American literature and American studies. (d.1950) The exchange of letters between him and his lover Russell Cheney are among the most revealing gay male documents of the 1920s.
Born in Pasadena, California, after his parents' divorce in 1915, Matthiessen lived on his grandfather's farm in Illinois, later attended boarding school in Tarrytown, New York. Toward the end of World War I, joined the Canadian Air Force. He entered Yale in 1919, where he was a member of Skull and Bones society, and graduated in 1923 with many honors, and then became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, receiving a B. Litt. in 1925.
Matthiessen's best-known book, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), discusses the flowering of literary culture in the middle of the American 19th century, with Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
While sailing for Oxford, he met the painter Russell Cheney; they would be lovers until Cheney's death in 1945. Cheney, though closeted in many ways, was a profoundly positive influence on Matthiessen, encouraging his interest in gay and lesbian literary figures like Walt Whitman and Sarah Orne Jewett.
The couple shared a cottage in Kittery, Maine for decades. In planning to spend his life with Cheney, Matthiessen went as far as asking his cohort in the Yale secret society Skull and Bones to approve of their partnership. With Cheney having encouraged Matthiessen's interest in Whitman, it has been argued that American Renaissance was "the ultimate expression of Matthiessen's love for Cheney and a secret celebration of the gay artist."
Matthiessen, as a gay man in the 1930s and 1940s, chose to remain in the closet throughout his professional career, if not in his personal life - although traces of homoerotic concern are apparent in his writings. In 2009, a statement from Harvard University said that Matthiessen "stands out as an unusual example of a gay man who lived his sexuality as an 'open secret' in the mid-20th century."
After Cheney's death in 1945, Matthiessen was increasingly distraught; he committed suicide by jumping from a window in 1950. Because Matthiessen's politics were left-wing, socialist, though not dogmatically Marxist, inquiries by House Un-American Activities Committee into his politics may also have been a factor in his suicide: writing in 1958, Eric Jacobsen referred to Matthiessen's death as "hastened by forces whose activities earned for themselves the sobriquet un-American which they sought so assiduously to fasten on others".
1921 – Dudley Cave was a British former soldier and pioneering gay rights activist (d.1999). He joined the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in 1941, aged 20, and was posted to the Far East. He was captured by the Japanese when Singapore fell in 1942 and was marched north to work on the Thai-Burma railway, 10 miles beyond the bridge on the River Kwai. He caught malaria and was imprisoned in Changi Prison in Singapore because he was unproductive. This may have saved his life. Three quarters of his company perished.
When back in Britain he had a job as manager of the Majestic Cinema, Wembley, but in 1954 he was sacked when it was discovered that he was gay. Also in 1954 he met Bernard Williams, an RAF veteran and school teacher, and they became lovers and co-campaigners for 40 years until Bernard Williams died in 1994.
In 1971 Dudley Cave joined the Unitarian Church and helped in securing the ordination of lesbians and gay men. He also conducted same-sex weddings.
In 1974 he was on the launch committee of the London Gay Switchboard, and he was still answering the telephone right up to his death 25 years later.
He and his partner, Bernard Williams, founded the Lesbian and Gay Bereavement Project in 1980, and they ran its telephone helpline for many years. After a battle with the Charity Commissioners this became the first organisation with 'gay' in its title to be given charitable status.
In the 1980s he worked on reconciliation with the Japanese and travelled a number of times to Japan to speak on the subject.
In November, 1998 he was OutRage!'s keynote speaker at its Queer Remembrance Day vigil at the Cenotaph where he layed a pink triangle wreath honouring gay people who died fighting Nazism and in the concentration camps.
Dudley Cave dedicated most of his life to challenging and fighting prejudice and seeking justice and equality for gay people especially in the areas of military recognition and issues of bereavement for gay people of all ages; he did so with great eloquence, dignity and integrity.
1925 – J. J. Belanger (d.1993) was member and officer in the Mattachine Society in the 1950s and 1960s, a volunteer in numerous causes in the 1970s and 1980s, and a collector of LGBT history, especially of AIDS-related materials of the mid-to-late 1980s.
The famous photo booth photo of J.J. Belanger above was rediscovered in 2014 and spread quickly through popular media such as The Advocate, TIME, Queerty, and blogs. It shows Robert Block and J. J. Belanger (right) in a photo booth photo in Hastings Park, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1953. It was taken at a time in Canadian history when the two men could have been arrested for kissing.
Joseph John Bertrund Belanger was born February 19, 1925, in Edmonton, Canada. He served in the Royal Canadian Air Force from 1942 to 1944 where he was awarded a Defense Medal, Canadian Voluntary Service Medal, and War Medal for his World War II service. He worked odd jobs in Vancouver and Calgary until 1954 when he joined the United States Air Force. He served for five years, earning the Aviation Badge, Good Conduct Medal, Outstanding Airman of the 26th Air Refueling Squadron, numerous other commendations, and a promotion.
Belanger became a member of the Mattachine Society in the early 1950s, but resigned in 1953 after an incident with police threatened to bring negative publicity to the organization. However, Belanger maintained contact with Hal Call and in 1958 became the Mattachine Society's Director of Public Relations. In 1959 he was voted out of the post, but still remained a member of the society.
From the 1950s Belanger lived in either San Francisco and Los Angeles, although the particulars of his life are documented only sporadically. He was the Los Angeles coordinator of the Eulenspiegel Society in the 1970s. In the 1980s he was politically involved with the San Francisco chapter of the Stonewall Gay Democratic Club, where he ran and lost a bid for treasurer in 1988. Also in the 1980s he volunteered for Project Inform and was a member of the Quarantine Fighter’s Group. Belanger was also a devoted collector of LGBT history, especially of AIDS-related materials of the mid-to-late 1980s.
Curtis in drag
1947 – John Holder Jr, better known as Jackie Curtis, was a famous transgendered film star, poet and playwright. (d.1985)
Curtis was born in New York City, and later died there of a drug overdose. He spent part of his life living and performing as a man (sometimes adopting a James Dean persona) and sometimes as a woman.
While living and performing in drag, she would typically wear lipstick, glitter around the eyes and in her frizzed-out red hair, and a dress, frequently ripped and torn, as were her stockings. This unique style, a combination of trash and glamour which Curtis pioneered in the late 1960s when frequenting such high profile nightclubs as Max's Kansas City, has prompted assertions that Jackie inspired the Glam Rock persona of the 1970s.
'Jackie Curtis is not a drag queen. Jackie is an artist. A pioneer without a frontier,' Andy Warhol said of his associate. Primarily a stage actor, Curtis debuted at the age of 17 in Tom Eyen's play Miss Neferititi Regrets. Curtis began to write his own plays immediately after this experience, often featuring famous transsexuals, such as his friend Candy Darling and, later, Holly Woodlawn, both of whom appeared in his productions which enjoyed successful runs Off-Off-Broadway and were well-reviewed in New York. Curtis's work is representative of the Theatre of the Ridiculous.
As writer and lead actress some of her plays include: Glamour, Glory and Gold; Amerika Cleopatra which featured Harvey Fierstein; Femme Fatale; and Heaven Grand In Amber Orbit with Holly Woodlawn, produced by John Vaccaro's Playhouse of the Ridiculous in 1970.
These plays caught the attention of Andy Warhol and his director Paul Morrissey, who cast Jackie and Candy in Flesh (1968) and, with the addition of Holly Woodlawn, in Women in Revolt (1971); a hilarious spoof of the women's liberation movement in which all the female leads are played by transsexuals and transvestites.
Apart from acting, Curtis also showed talent in poetry and singing. Jackie Curtis made two more movies during the 1980s. Drug addiction, however, had taken control of Curtis's life, eventually leading to his death.
In 2004, a film based on Curtis's life, Superstar in a Housedress, brought Jackie Curtis back to the limelight, exposing some little known facts about the performer to the public. Curtis's influence on a number of people, friends and associates such as Holly Woodlawn, Joe Dallesandro and Penny Arcade, and observers such as David Bowie, is noted in the film.
1952 – California artist Lari Pittman creates visually beautiful and exciting paintings that depict the anxiety attendant on being a gay male in America. They confront the perils and dangers that threaten homosexuality even as they resolutely affirm homosexual love.
Lari Pittman was born in Glendale, California. Pittman spent much of his childhood in the Colombian cities of Cali and Tumace, where his father worked in the lumber industry. An effeminate child, he loved playing with his mother's jewelry. His desire to decorate with baubles received parental support and has deeply influenced his subsequent art.
After studying painting at University of California, Los Angeles from 1970 to 1973, Pittman transferred to the California Institute of Arts. Pittman held his first solo exhibition in 1982 to mixed reactions. His early works, full of obscure references, are purposely made to be difficult for the viewer to decipher.
In 1985, Pittman changed his style as the result of suffering a near fatal attack. One night, he discovered a burglar in his home. When he attempted to scare off the man, he was shot in the stomach. The injury resulted in a colostomy and a long period of recovery. After this harrowing, near death experience, Pittman decided to stop being evasive about his homosexuality and about the thematics of his work. He has since sought to erase the distinction between the private and the public as a means of gay activism.
Pittman's post-1985 imagery is much more open and readable than his earlier imagery. In This Wholesomeness, Beloved and Despised, Continues Regardless (1990), for example, he creates a complex narrative through the use of accessible images. At the center of this canvas is a gay couple making love. However, the decorative elements in the painting are both celebratory and ominous, ranging from an inscribed "69" (a motif he uses in several works) to a noose and a menacing figure wielding a knife. Thus, the work's narrative structure celebrates gay relationships, but also acknowledges the homophobic conditions in which they are experienced. The painting makes an affecting statement about the persistence and perseverance of gay love even in the face of hatred and persecution.
"In This Wholesomeness …
Pittman's paintings consider American identity and history, often incorporating motifs from folk art and popular culture, as in An American Place (1986). Such motifs give his work a cartoon-like quality, with every space packed with imagery and action.
An American Place
The emphasis that Pittman places on queerness has led some critics to describe him as the prince of queer agit-prop art. He has been attacked for being too political because he has dared to address the difficulties of life as a gay man in paintings that grab attention. Indeed, Pittman may be justly regarded as our foremost painter of gay pride.
He lives in Los Angles with his longtime companion, fellow artist Roy Dowell, with whom he sometimes collaborates.
1987 – Jeffery Self is an American actor, writer, and comedian.
Self is a native of Georgia, who grew up in the South. After attending middle school, Self persuaded his parents to let him be homeschooled to avoid dealing in high school with the fact that he was gay.
Self has appeared in many television shows as a recurring, featured or guest actor. He and Cole Escola starred in the sketch comedy series Jeffery & Cole Casserole, which aired on Logo TV for two seasons. He has also appeared in Desperate Housewives, 90210, Hot In Cleveland, Torchwood, Shameless, Difficult People, and as Liz Lemon's cousin Randy Lemon on NBC's 30 Rock. He is the author of two humor books: Fifty Shades Of Gay and Straight People: A Spotters Guide, as well as the young adult novels A Very Very Bad Thing and Drag Teen. He co-wrote, produced, and starred in the indie horror/comedy cult hit You're Killing Me. He was the host of the MTV series, Scream: After Dark, a talk show devoted to deleted scenes and interviews with the cast of the popular MTV horror series Scream. He currently plays Marc Doober on Search Party on TBS.
Self is openly gay. He dated Patrick McDonald of Fire Island for three years and publicly blogged about their breakup. On January 8, 2017, Self and his boyfriend, Augustus Prew, announced their engagement via Instagram. They were married on January 13, 2018 in Culver City, California.
1993 – The Crying Game, a film written and directed by Neil Jordan, portrays the relationship between a transsexual woman and an IRA fighter in London. In 1999, the British Film Institute named it the 26th greatest British film of all time.
2007 – In New Jersey the first same-sex couple, Daniel Gross and Steven Goldstein, held a civil union ceremony when hundreds of Gay couples were granted the same legal rights, if not the title, as married couples as New Jersey became the third state to offer civil unions.
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time for a new intro post—hi, I’m C. J. Linton! You can call me CJ or Case.
I’m a game designer, editor, voluntary forever GM, and the business director of Sly Robot Games with Dominique Dickey (@domsdickey). Our games include:
Tomorrow on Revelation III, about surviving and resisting capitalism on a heavily stratified space station.
Plant Girl Game, about a family of plant children working together with their community to prevent ecological disaster.
The Prince of Nothing Good (upcoming!), a heist about a notorious thief pulling together his crew for one last job in a fantastical and hostile city.
I’ve also written Bring Down the House, which is about ghosts trying to dispose of their home’s latest occupants, and Those of Us Who Know Better, about trans superheroes whose powers come at a price.
I do a lot of things outside of tabletop roleplaying games that I also talk about on here, including:
Dramaturgy and new play development. (My dramaturgy pretty significantly informs my game development and editing practices.) I’m currently working with two playwrights, one working on a sort of adaptation of "A White Heron" by Sarah Orne Jewett that is also an ecological problem play and one working on a very Jewish journalism-y Superman play.
Bookbinding and other handcraft sundries. I am a small part of the sustainable bookbinding, needlework, and papermaking operation run by my partner, Amethyst Alchemist. I make a lot of book cloth, bind a lot of books, and occasionally cross stitch pieces for the front covers.
Fiction, board games, video games, and other writing/media, especially science fiction and cyberpunk, engine building games, critique, and my own work. I am a proponent of a generous but more honest ecosystem of media criticism, and I speak transparently about works that didn’t work for me.
and I'd love to be doing more editing and dramaturgy, so feel free to get in touch about that.
In most other places, I am @NearFutures: itch.io, Bluesky, Cohost, Twitter. and this is my website, which I am trying to be better about keeping up to date.
#lots of new folks in the last few days so figured it was a good time to update this!#i'll be playtesting The Prince of Nothing Good at Big Bad Con so if you'll be there...come say hi / try it out#i debated making a lists of favorites / things i want to jabber with people about but that's for a different post i think#about#indie ttrpg#bookbinding
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La delicatezza
è in realtà
una sorta di lettura del pensiero.
Sarah Orne Jewett
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Advice on writing from writers
1.
I can only say that I kept reading and reading and your book never fucking began. You just kept telling the reader how extraordinary your leading character was. You obviously have talent, but what is the good of it if most of your readers (as I suspect) will either read you uncomfortably or stop altogether. This won’t be because they are not necessarily up to the mark but because of the glittering vanity with which you put your sentences together. I would never tell you that you don’t have talent. You are in a peculiar position of having too much felicity with words and, therefore, do not seem ready as yet, to get into the hard and often dreary literary mechanics of writing novels and editing them. These are harsh words, but you are bright enough and I would like to encourage you to take the art of novel writing more seriously than your enjoyment of yourself.
Norman Mailer
Letter to John Kriegsman
21st July 2006
(Source: Selected Letters of Norman Mailer, edited by J. Michael Lennon
2.
Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society, all Bohemia; the city, the country—in short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentiment falls to sentimentality��you can write about life, but never write life itself. And to write and work on this level, we must live on it—we must at least recognize it and defer to it at every step. We must be ourselves, but we must be our best selves.
Sarah Orne Jewett
Letter to Willa Cather
13th December 1908
(Source: The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, edited by Andrew Jewell)
3.
A long time ago when I was writing for pulps I put into a story a line like “he got out of the car and walked across the sun-drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water.” They took it out when they published the story. Their readers didn’t appreciate this sort of thing: just held up the action. And I set out to prove them wrong. My theory was that they just thought they cared nothing about anything but the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, they cared very little about the action. The things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialog and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn't even hear death knock on the door. That damn little paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers and he just couldn't push it to the edge of the desk and catch it as it fell.
Raymond Chandler
Letter to Frederick Lewis Allen
7th May 1948
(Source: Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, edited by Frank McShane)
4.
For Christ sake write and don’t worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
Ernest Hemingway
Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
28th May 1934
(Source: Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961, edited by Carlos Baker)
5.
For a writer, a feeling for words—for language—must be the principal thing—the central endowment. Without such a feeling it is useless to apply oneself to the hard, hard tasks which face the writer, throughout his or her career. You have this feeling for language, but you have not developed it very far. For you do not write, as we say, “in form.” You write free verse. At seventeen, if you are to go on writing poetry, you must not only begin to acquaint yourself with the effects of formal verse, but you must begin to use these effects. You can begin by imitating this poet or that as long as you admit that you are imitating. You must begin to practise—as a pianist practises (only you are practising creatively, of course-not merely performing). You show a slight tendency toward form, in these poems of your manuscript, but not consistently. I should say, from present evidence, that you might very well turn out to be a writer of prose—a novelist, say, if you have any storytelling ability.
So try writing all sorts of things! And look into some textbooks on prosody. Poetry Handbook, by Babette Deutsch (Funk and Wagnall) is a valuable, recent such book, that has received high praise from many people, including myself. Any book store will order it for you.
Write and read! Read and write! Those are the two rules.
Louise Bogan
Letter to an aspiring poet
6th April 1984
(Source: What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan, 1920-1970, edited by Ruth Limmer)
6.
Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
David Ogilvy
Memo to his colleagues
17th September 1982
(Source: The Unpublished David Ogilvy, edited by Joel Raphaelson)
7.
Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.
Let me preach again for one moment: I mean that what you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Letter to his daughter
20th October 1936
(Source: A Life in Letters, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli)
8.
You describe a sweet place, but your descriptions are often more minute than will be liked. You give too many particulars of right hand and left.
Jane Austen
Letter to her niece
9th September 1814
(Source: Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Dierdre Le Faye)
9.
There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed. I must have written half a million words (mostly in my journal) before I had anything published, save for a couple of short items in St. Nicholas. If you want to write about feelings, about the end of summer, about growing, write about it. A great deal of writing is not “plotted”—most of my essays have no plot structure, they are a ramble in the woods, or a ramble in the basement of my mind. You ask, “Who cares?” Everybody cares. You say, “It’s been written before.” Everything has been written before.
E. B. White
Letter to Miss R.
15th September 1973
(Source: Letters of E. B. White, edited by Dorothy Lobrano Guth)
10.
When authors write best, or, at least, when they write most fluently, an influence seems to waken in them which becomes their master—which will have its way —putting out of view all behests but its own, dictating certain words, and insisting on their being used, whether vehement or measured in their nature, new moulding characters, giving unthought of turns to incidents, rejecting carefully elaborated old ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new ones.
Charlotte Brontë
Letter to George Henry Lewes
12th January 1848
(Source: The Brontës: Life and Letters, edited by Clement Shorter)
11.
1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theatre, it doesn't exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn't belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.
John Steinbeck
Letter to Robert Wallsten
14th February 1962
(Source: Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten)
12.
Keep writing and profit by criticism. Mind grammar, spelling, and punctuation, use short words, and express as briefly as you can your meaning. Young people use too many adjectives and try to “write fine.” The strongest, simplest words are best, and no foreign ones if it can be helped.
Write, and print if you can; if not, still write, and improve as you go on. Read the best books, and they will improve your style. See and hear good speakers and wise people, and learn of them. Work for twenty years, and then you may some day find that you have a style and place of your own, and can command good pay for the same things no one would take when you were unknown.
Louisa May Alcott
Letter to Mr. J. P. True
24th October (year unknown)
(Source: Louisa May Alcott: Her life, letters, and journals, edited by Edna D. Cheney)
13.
1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”
5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
C. S. Lewis
Letter to Joan
26th June 1956
(Source: Letters of C. S. Lewis, edited by W. H. Lewis)
14.
Do be careful of your adjectives – do try and be terse, there is so much more force in a rapid style that will not be hampered by superfluous details. Just look at your piece and see how many three lined sentences could be comfortably expressed in one line. . . try to be terse and in some way original – the world abounds with new similes and metaphors.
D. H. Lawrence
Letter to Louise Burrows
September 1906
Source: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol.1, edited by James T. Boulton)
15.
[F]rom its exposition through its agon, to its unravelling a plot should be a living organism, and its central intelligence, the voice which manipulates and dialectically arouses, fulfils and frustrates my expectations, and which ultimately rewards me with a perception into the meaning of all the sound and fury that makes up a story, is one into whose hands I have surrendered my own intelligence, imagination, and sense of life. And when that central intelligence assumes such responsibility and authority but fails to deliver, he violates my trust and embarrasses the author for whom he acts as surrogate.
Ralph Ellison
Letter to Horace Porter
29th February 1986
(Source: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan & Marc Conner)
16.
Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?
Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacles. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.
Kurt Vonnegut
Letter to the students of Xavier High School
5th November 2006
(Source: More Letters of Note)
BONUS
This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.
Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
Gary Provost
100 Ways to Improve Your Writing
1985
(Source)
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I don't care whether it's a man's work or a woman's work; if it is hers I'm going to help her the very best way I can.
from A Country Doctor by Sarah Orne Jewett
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The Lighthouse
Robert Eggers has credited a lot of influences on his THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019, Showtime) — Poe, Lang, 1890s photography of New England, Beckett, Pinter and Sarah Orne Jewett’s regional novels among them — but he’s never mentioned the films of Guy Madden. The more hallucinatory scenes in Eggers’ film bear a striking resemblance to much of Madden’s work, even down to his use of black and white and a more archaic aspect ratio. And as Madden often does, he uses the film to dissect masculinity and desire. Madden tends to go further with that. Eggers suggests the attraction between two men trapped on a remote island together without ever going all the way. It’s still an intriguing psychological story, however, as apprentice lighthouse keeper Robert Pattinson and old hand Willem Dafoe first clash, then bond and finally go mad when a massive storm prevents their relief boat from arriving on time. Even before the boat arrives they’re acting strangely. Dafoe won’t let Pattinson near the actual light and strips naked when he’s in the light chamber. Pattinson either sees or fantasizes sexual encounters with a mermaid and Dafoe’s congress with some strange sea creature in the light chamber, Sometimes Eggers has so many ideas going he can’t carry all of them to fruition. When the food supply is ruined by dampness the day after the relief boat fails to show up, Dafoe suddenly says they’ve been marooned without fresh food for weeks. Later, he accuses Pattinson of destroying their lifeboat when we’ve seen him do it himself. Yet nothing is made of these falsehoods later. Even Pinter, whose mysterious exchanges are mirrored in some of the earlier scenes, would have gone somewhere with plot points like that. Still, the film is visually compelling and has a great sound score with natural sounds and Mark Korven’s brooding brass chords. The two actors perform with great conviction and connect throughout. Pattinson occasionally lets his acting show through, but Dafoe seems to have wandered in from a 19th century painting. He’s so real he makes even the most outlandish scenes seem like slice of life.
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