In a brief chapter about perfectionism, she offers this – helpful to writers, visual artists, actors, musicians, chefs…whatever your art form!

“Prefectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life…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.

Besides, perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force…Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter is wonderfully fertile ground…Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it’s going to get. Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation, while writing needs to breathe and move.

. . .

What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here – and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing.”

Learn more about (or buy!) the book HERE.

“He imitates gestures, examines objects. He sees a hat, he puts it on his head; he sees a seagull and is determined to fly himself; he sees a telephone and dials, accidentally summoning the fire department; he sees house painters and decides to paint.
His misadventures, particularly in the early books, are ignited by impulse and inquiry, the consequences of wanting to see and to know, and the books’ charm is that they don’t condemn this curiosity; they relish it. Reality’s hard knocks — the chases, the falls, the breaking of limbs and objects — are ultimately taken care of by the nameless man in the yellow hat, who never seems to learn that you don’t leave such a childlike creature alone with a new bike, saying, ‘Keep close to the house while I am gone.’”

Read about the

There are daily audio clips and emails with poetry, prose, and literary history with Garrison Keillor of American Public Media.

The Writer’s Almanac

“To find a honey tree, first catch a bee. Catch a bee when its legs are heavy with pollen; then it is ready for home. It is simple enough to catch a bee on a flower: hold a cup or glass above the bee, and when it flied up, cap the cup with a piece of cardboard. Carry the bee to a nearby open spot – best an elevated one – release it, and watch where it goes. Keep your eyes on it as long as you can see it, and hie you to that last known place. Wait there until you see another bee; catch it, release it, and watch. Bee after bee will lead toward the honey tree, until you see the final bee enter the tree. Thoreau describes this process in his journals. So a book [a song, a script, a painting] leads its writer.

You may wonder how you start, how you catch the fist one. What do you use for bait?

You have no choice. One bad winter in the Arctic, and not too long ago, an Algonquin woman and her baby were left alone after everyone else in their winter camp had starved. Ernest Thompson Seton tells it. The woman walked from the camp where everyone had died, and found at a lake a cache. The cache contained one small fishhook. It was simple to rig a line, but she had no bait, and no hope of bait. The baby cried. Che took a knife and cut a strip from her own thigh. She fished with the worm of her own flesh and caught a jackfish; she fed the child and herself. Of course she saved the fish gut for bait. She lived alone at the lake, on fish, until spring, when she walked out again and found people. Seton’s informant had seen the scar on her thigh.”

(Excerpt from The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard, 1989)

Jerome David Salinger retreated to a New Hampshire farmhouse in 1953, a few years after he published the high-school classic The Catcher in the Rye. And there he stayed, for the next 50-plus years, scowling at photographers who dared snap his picture…”

(Read the full article from NPR HERE)

There is a lengthier article about Salinger on the New York Times website if you are interested in reading more.

‘I Refuse to Publish’

Salinger’s published works include Nine Stories, a short story collection, and Franny and Zooey, a novella about one of his favorite fictive subjects, the sensitive Glass family. His last published work was a short story that took up almost the wholeNew Yorker magazine in 1965 — though rumors have Salinger stashing reams of unpublished fiction in a vault.

Salinger rarely explained himself, though the interview requests never ceased. In 1980, reporter Betty Eppes sent her picture along with her request. She was granted one of the only interviews the author ever gave.

“He said, ‘I refuse to publish,’” she told NPR in 1997. “‘There’s a marvelous peace in not publishing,’ he said. ‘There’s a stillness. When you publish, the world thinks you owe something. If you don’t publish, they don’t know what you’re doing. You can keep it for yourself.’”

Others come bursting with emotion, spilled verse after verse in abstract language. I know the poets are sad or happy or confused or in love, because they tell me in so many words. However, if I were to line their poems up on the apple wall you might not discern the difference, except that each is stenciled with a distinct name.

Before I go any further, let me be very clear. This is not a criticism of beginning poets. I absolutely love the enthusiasm, efforts and warmth, the beautiful relationships I form with people who offer their words to me. Furthermore, I struggle with the same issues, especially when I’m trying to write poetry that is a first-try at a fresh life theme.

So that you’ll believe me, let me share a poem I composed as part of a new endeavor to write about my childhood loss of three homes to fire. Losing three homes in any fashion is hard; losing them to fire is a deeply emotional reality. This was my first try at putting it into poetry…”

(This is an article excerpt from TheCurator. View the full article HERE)

Speak.

The internet movie database summarizes the film this way: “After a blurred trauma over the summer, Melinda enters high school a selective mute. Struggling with school, friends, and family, she tells the dark tale of her experiences, and why she has chosen not to speak.”

That doesn’t quite cut it.

A large part of Melinda’s recovery was found in her freshman art class where her teacher had each student draw a slip of paper out of a makeshift bucket. The word written on that slip of paper was assigned to the student for the whole school year – every peice of artwork they created had to be an expression of that one word.

Melinda’s word was “tree”. And the healing begins…

At one point her art teacher says that fear and anger…and other strong emotions…can be the driving force behind the art.

I haven’t read the book…YET…but the movie is excellent and I highly recommend it.

Find out more about the book HERE.

Find out more about the movie HERE and HERE.

.   .   .   .   .

Cormac McCarthy has written more than a dozen novels, several screenplays, two plays, two short stories, countless drafts, letters and more — and nearly every one of them was tapped out on a portable Olivetti manual typewriter he bought in a Knoxville, Tenn., pawnshop around 1963 for $50…

Mr. McCarthy is known for being taciturn, particularly about his writing. He came to realize that not only his working method but even his tools are puzzling to a younger generation…

He remembers one summer when some graduate students were visiting the Santa Fe Institute. “I was in my office clacking away,” he said. “One student peered in and said: ‘Excuse me. What is that?’ ”

Read the full artice HERE.

It only makes sense for differences to surface, right?

So why do people raise such a fuss over book-turned-movie?

Here’s a really great article from The Curator…read the following excerpt – if you like it, check out the full article: An Open Letter on Adaptations.

”

Okay, look — you’ve told me a few times that the book is better than the movie.

Did you know that I read the book, too? Honestly, I also like it better than the movie. I guess the folks that adapted it for the screen really left out a lot. Two of my favorite subplots, for instance. Yeah, the one with the unsigned letters? That was so scary in the book. Oh, and the scriptwriters added a bunch of stuff that wasn’t in the book, and, well, I sort of wish that all of the internal monologues made it to the screen, too. They added a sense of humor that just wasn’t in the movie. And I can’t believe that they changed the protagonist’s hair color.

But you know what? The movie was actually pretty good. Maybe really good.

Stop laughing! Think about this: no matter how good a book-to-film adaptation is, fans will have a one-up on whatever the filmmakers can put on the screen – their imagination. Your imagination does a lot of heavy lifting; regardless of what faults a novel has, the imagination fills in the blanks, splashes on the perfect atmosphere, gives all of the characters the best possible traits to tell the story. At least, all of the best things for the reader.

So in a way, movie adaptations are really sketchings of written stories, not photographs. And besides, film and literature are two very different ways to tell a story, with both strengths and weaknesses that don’t overlap as much as we wish they did. Trying to transfer one to the other without any changes just doesn’t work — it’s almost like trying to adapt an epic poem into a short folk song. As storytelling forms, the few similarities are crowded out by the differences that have to be taken into account. Otherwise, you’d have day-long songs that no one would want to listen to, let alone make…

…Here’s something to try: go watch a movie based on a book you love, but try to take a step back and just watch it as a movie. Pretend that you’ve never opened the book, even.”