On being made acquainted with the present Mr Darcy’s treatment of him, she tried to remember something of that gentleman’s reputed disposition when quite a lad which might agree with it, and was confident at last that she recollected having heard Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy formerly spoken of as a very proud, ill-natured boy.
Can I just…right now I need to talk about how much I love Jane Austen, and how subtly (yet pointedly) she gives social commentary. The woman was fucking brilliant. There are so many authors I admire, but for the most part the things that draw me to them aren’t unique. I adore Fitzgerald’s lyrical style, and there’s of course something about it that is entirely his, but I can find the same resonance in Isherwood and Hemingway and Stein. I feel like Austen, though, is different. She has a way of delivering piercing insights, in a manner so graceful it’s hardly noticeable, that I’ve never really seen elsewhere. I mean, I’m sure it exists somewhere in the world. If you’ve seen it, send it my way so I can soak it in and bask in the beauty of it. But I re-read this book every year and I never stop being amazed by the delicate incisiveness that permeates even the smallest lines of her prose. From the very first page (“You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it”), Austen manages to reveal entire worlds in a handful of words.
On a practical level, it serves as a reminder to trust the reader. On a visceral level, I wish I could just absorb that talent for myself and inject it into all the things I do.
One day I’m going to forget to delete the notes I make to myself in the body of my essays while writing.
And my professor is just going to stumble across, “[Insert a transition here. No. Fucking seriously. Do this.]” and think I’ve completely lost it.
We let ourselves loose on that simple blank piece of paper, and our bodies spill. The terror, the love…embodying our stories page after page. In a sense, the pen was our tongue, it is how we delineate the world.
(via teachingliteracy)
Source: amandaonwriting
It’s a weird thing, writing.
Sometimes you can look out across what you’re writing, and it’s like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer’s day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you’ll be going on your walk.
And that’s wonderful.
Sometimes it’s like driving through fog. You can’t really see where you’re going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you’re probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you’ll still get where you were going.
And that’s hard while you’re doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn’t exist in that order down on paper, half of what you’d get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.
And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you’re doing and where you’re going, and you couldn’t see or know any of that five minutes before.
And that’s magic.
(via neil-gaiman)
Source: journal.neilgaiman.com
Finished a full draft of my Lucy Stone essay.
FINALLY.
Sent it off to my mom to read and edit, although the poor woman is in for something, because I don’t think she’s ever seen my completely unedited work. Poor mom. There are going to be so many notes on that essay (if she has time to read it tomorrow — since I sent it to her two days late, I told her not to worry with it if she doesn’t have time).
Tomorrow I may make a call for Tumblr friends who are willing to read it and be completely brutal with me. Seriously guys. I don’t like you to fuck around and play nice when I have a grade on the line. But there are some things I know I need to fix (but am too tired to correct tonight), so I’ll do that tomorrow and see what my primary editor’s day looks like before I ask that of you.
Thanks to John Green for the quote that defines my life.
I don’t consider myself a writer, but I think the quote is interesting.
Yep, this is incredibly true for me.
(via alpha-lima-lima-papa)
Last night a friend asked me what my New Year’s resolution was. I didn’t have one — to be honest, I haven’t made one since middle school.
But in thinking it over, I’ve decided to make one single resolution this year.
I promise myself that this year I will finish my novel. Not a perfect draft of it! But I vow to complete it and to do a first set of revisions (although in some parts it will already be the 20th set of revisions, since some bits of the novel have been around much longer than others).
I’ll be maintaining other goals, of course, but those were already part of my plan. This is something separate, something not necessary to my life goals (I mean, finishing a novel is, but not this year), but that will enrich my life.
I’m rewriting/finishing the novel that I started during NaNoWriMo last year, and I keep stumbling across notes like “[Will need to insert some road time here. Currently too tired to do anything except transcribe, and my lazy ass skipped ahead here.]”
Oh, Past Kendra. Why must you leave tasks like this to Future Kendra? She does not appreciate it.
I want to post a little bit of what I’m writing.
But I also want to get it published one day? So I feel like that’s probably not a good idea.
I dreamed a Robin Hood-Paladin-Sinbad life...
