without creativity we cannot revolt
List Lover #2 : Writing advice
Hello friends,
The first frost fell here in Wicklow overnight. White roofs, lace-leaves. And ooof it’s cold. You’d have found me this morning at 8am outside my house in my pyjamas hoovering our car (long story) hawing into my hands to try and keep them working as I cleaned. Now as I type the low sun has melted the white from one side of the garden, the other, shaded, remains white. The low sun is warming the left hand side of my face, too.
I’ve a few bits of news to share before our post today - which is fun one I hope - so stick around!
𓇸 I’m so excited to share that an essay I wrote on ‘Interruption in motherhood’ will be published in a collection titled Mother Becoming: Reflections and Scholarship on Matrescence, edited by Jessie Harrold and published by Demeter Press next February. Through scholarship and storytelling alike, Mother Becoming unearths the multidimensional, kaleidoscopic nature of matrescence while also highlighting research, policy and practice recommendations to better support mothers. There are a total of 22 incredible contributors to the book, including fellow Substack writers Sarah Pedersen, Genevieve Beech and Devon Parish. It was a joy to write this piece and I’m so excited to see it come into the world early next year. You can preorder copies via THIS LINK with a 20% discount using code MOTHERS.
𓇸 It was also a delight to contribute to Lyndsay Kaldor’s beautiful online seasonal retreat The Softening, alongside a beautiful bouquet of other writers including Lauren Barber, Kendall Marie Platt 🌱, Katharina Geissler-Evans, heiter magazine and Louise Morris. The online retreat starts on November 26th, and you can find out more over on Lyndsay’s page.
𓇸 And finally, a reminder that we will be back for a three week dive into the early morning dark for a deep winter solstice edition of Sitting in the Dark. More info next week (including a special subscription offer!), but if the idea sparks something, pencil these dates in your diary: 6-7am GMT on Dec 5, 12 & 19. A way to mark the end of a year, sit in the holding of the dark and see what comes in the quiet company of friends. More anon!
𓇸 Ok, and now to this week’s post, which is a list of sorts.
During our MULCH call this week we spoke a lot about the overwhelm, the insecurity and also the strange imperative drive that is involved in the writing process.
And so I thought it might be of interest to share some of my favourite writing quotes with you from wiser and more seasoned writers than myself!
I’ve chosen these as words that I hope will inspire, galvanise, soothe, having you nodding along, feeling understood and also sometimes a little bit told off (in the best way!
Enjoy all these pearls and do share with me any more you love, or which of these sparked something in you.
On the space and the gaps
‘I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged, damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.’
– May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
‘You have to at some point go into a room, you close the door and tell people not to come in… constant interruptions are the destruction of the imagination.’
– Joyce Carol Oates
‘Live in the library! Live in the library, for Christ’s sake. Don’t live on your goddam computer and the internet and all that crap. Go to the library.’
– Ray Bradbury
‘We often think that our affairs, great or small, must be tended continuously and in detail, or our world will disintegrate, and we will lose our places in the universe. That is not true … Once a year or so I give myself a day away. I wake naturally, for I have set no clock, not informed by body timepiece when it should alarm. I dress in casual clothes and leave my house going no place. If I live in a city, I wander streets, window-shop, or gaze at buildings. I enter and leave public parks, libraries, the lobbies of skyscrapers and movie houses. I stay no place for very long. On the getaway day I try for amnesia. I do not want to know my name, where I live or how many dire responsibilities on my shoulders. Each person deserves a day away, in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for . Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops.’
– Maya Angelou Wouldn’t Take Nothing for my Journey Now
On the power of words
‘The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. In some way, your aspirations and concern for a single man in fact do begin to change the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.’ – James Baldwin
‘Nobody can guess how a person’s life or people’s fate may be changed by one book, or one poem, or even a single sentence.’ - Ursula K. Le Guin
On how to write
‘You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next … I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories … May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love remake a world.’ – Ray Bradbury
‘Sometimes it comes very quickly. Seems almost to come from the top of my head. But in fact, it’s been gestating for a long, long time. Most of the time it’s not like that. Usually it’s a matter of writing, recognising it ain’t right or it won’t move. You tear it up and do it again and again. And then one day something happens – it works. - James Baldwin
‘Write. Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say. If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you’re not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.’ – James Baldwin
‘Write – every day, no excuses. It’s so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they’d rather clear the toilet than do the writing.’ – Octavia E. Butler
On writing being fu**ing hard
‘A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people’ – Thomas Mann
‘Writing is a delicious agony.’ – Gwendolyn Brooks
‘Easy reading is damn hard writing’ – Nathaniel Hawthorne
‘I hate writing, I love having written.’ – Dorothy Parker
On creativity
‘To be creative means to connect. It’s to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and non fiction.
– Nawal El Saadawi
‘Creativity is not just writing novels or composing a piece of music. Creativity means to revolt against injustice. The revolution against injustice needs creativity. Without creativity we cannot revolt’
– Nawal El Saadawi
‘The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.’ – Mary Oliver
‘I write only because
There is a voice within me
That will not be still.’
- Sylvia Plath
On the nuts and bolts
‘Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.’ – Stephen King
‘The first draft of anything is shit’ – Ernest Hemingway
‘Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.’ – Doris Lessing
‘Talent is no good without commitment. I’ve had students who wrote very well, but weren’t willing to commit to write, to go on writing, and to go on writing. But that’s what it takes.’ – Ursula K. Le Guin
‘First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.’ – Octavia E. Butler
‘And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.’ – John Steinbeck
‘Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane you whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.’ – Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
(this one is for myself, right now!)
‘You need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it’s not the head of a writer in the thick of it. It’s the head of a smart stranger who picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read.’ – Zadie Smith
Any of these words of advice ring true or land as an ah ha! for you?
Share in comments, I’d love to hear.
oh so good, thank you Layla, so inspiring. think my favourite is Thomas Mann - ‘A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people’ !!
YESSSSSS Layla!!!! Needed this x