Sit down.
Be yourself.
Be prepared.
Be attentive.
Defy the voices.
Be the thing you want to be.
Write.
Be playful.
Be reckless.
Remember that you are uniquely designed for the idea that is moving toward you.
You are good enough.
The idea is about to arrive.
—Nick Cave,
The Red Hand Files, issue #9
When a child draws, he doesn't intend to distort, but to set down exactly what he sees. And as his gaze is direct, he sees the lines that create motion.
—Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners (paraphrased)
As a writer, she intends to see the lines of spiritual motion.
Good human work honors God’s work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit.
—Wendell Berry, "Christianity and The Survival of Creation”,
via Alan Jacobs
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the problem of writing is always the problem of who you were...
—M. John Harrison