#obliquely whiny posts

[undercover-horn-blog]

Common cold symptom we totally neglect in sickfic: Clogged ears that make it difficult to hear what people are saying.

Sometimes blowing your nose makes it better, at least temporarily, because they pop. Sometimes it makes it so much worse and you have to ask people to repeat themselves because you can't hear shit.

[kellyspillman]

Favorite Quotes Bird by Bird by Ann Lamott

I have started performing in storytelling shows which has allowed me to tip my toe into writing. I just finished Bird by Bird and it was just the book I needed to encourage me to write everyday. I went through entire pads of post-its to mark inspiring passages. It was an agonizing experience trying to narrow down this book to 5 of the most memorable quotes but here it goes:

Ever since I was a little kid, I've thought that there was something noble and mysterious about writing, about the people who could do it well, who could create a world as if they were little gods or sorcerers. All my life I've felt that there was something magical about people who could get into each other's minds and skin, who could take people like me out of ourselves and then take us back into ourselves. And you know what? I still do. So now I teach. This just sort of happened. Someone offered me a gig teaching a writing workshop about ten years ago, and I've been writing classes ever since. But you can't teach writing, people tell me. And I say, "Who the hell are you, God's dean of admissions?" xxvii

Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your own family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do? Get it all down. Let it pour out of you on the page. Write an incredibly shitty, self-indulgent, whiny, mewling first draft. Then take out as many excesses as you can...I also sent it to an important magazine editor. He sent it back with the following note:  "You have made the mistake of thinking that everything that has happened to you is interesting." 193

Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle and oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done. If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act- truth is always subversive. 226

In this dark and wounded society, writing can give you the pleasures of the woodpecker, of hollowing out a hole in a tree where you can build your nest and say, "This is my niche, this is where I live now, this is where I belong." And the niche may be small and dark, but at last you will finally know what you are doing. After thirty years or more of floundering around and screwing up, you will finally know, and when you get serious you will be dealing with one thing you've been avoiding all along-your wounds. This is very painful. It stops a lot of people early on who didn't get into this for the pain. They got into it for the money and fame. So they either quit or they resort to a type of writing that is sort of like candy making. 234-235

Even if only the people in your writing group read your memoirs or stories or novel, even if you only wrote your story so that one day your children would know what life was like when you were a child and you knew the name of every dog in town- still, to have written your version is an honorable thing to have done. Against all odds, you have put it down on paper, so that it won't be lost. And who knows? Maybe what you have written will help others, will be a small part of the solution. You don't even have to know how or in what way, but if you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses don't go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining. 235-236