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Posts Tagged ‘Writers’

“I think it’s important to remember that something that’s happening to you is not the only thing happening in the world. There’s always another story.” — Arundhati Roy

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“I don’t think fantasy really works except when Gandalf says, ‘You don’t get to choose your moment, you just have to live it… He was right—you don’t get to choose the moment—we’re here, we have to live it… by the time you are my age, a lot will have gone down. I want you to focus on the good and to try and make the good in a team effort.” — Kim Stanley Robinson, 2026 Middlebury College Commencement Address

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Today I want to share a fun non-fiction essay by one of my favorite fiction writers, T. Kingfisher. It’s about history and gardening and passion, real-life inspiration for fiction, and heroes saving one small but important thing.

History, Discovery, and the Quiet Heroics of Gardening – Reactor

So what does all this mean, for a writer? Well, it may not be holding the bridge at Thermopylae, but I keep coming back to how many gardeners end up saving a small piece of the world. Whether it’s a food from a lost homeland or a cultivar that is about to vanish from the earth, so often it comes down to one person who kept something small but important from being lost forever.

May we all be so heroic.

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If you’ve ever read a book and thought, “I will never write anything this good,” and feel the urge to give up your own creative efforts, this article may be for you:

The thing every writer needs to overcome – Big Think

It’s common to feel embarrassed, shy, and self-conscious when we are writing. It’s easy to feel the need to be different when someone else has done it so well already. But, as the saying goes, the woods would be very silent if the only birds that sang were those who sang best. So, sing anyway. Sing badly, sing well, sing as much as you can… The point was never to out-sing the nightingale; our “business is to create.”

What also helps? Not taking myself too seriously!

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The Surprising Truth About What Outer Space Smells Like

Some space veterans seemed to find this scent quite pleasant. “It is hard to describe this smell; it is definitely not the olfactory equivalent of describing the palate sensations of some new food that ‘tastes like chicken.’ 

Yes, these are the things I find interesting about space. Not the math (with apologies to all my math teachers ever) or the physics (with apologies to all the classes I never took), but the lived experience. 

When I’m thinking about a story and need to ground the reader, this sort of information is useful. What would it feel like, what would it taste like?

What would it smell like?

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“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.” — Rebecca Solnit

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There’s always a dream within a dream within a dream. — Dolly Parton

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Write what you love to come upon. —Anne Lamott 

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“Your fans, the ones that exist and the ones you have yet to make, will appreciate that what they get from you is from you. That’s what people mostly want from art: Entertainment and connection. You will always be able to do that better than ‘Al.’” — John Scalzi

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It’s understandable that a lot of beginners at any art want rules for how to do it. But there comes a time when one has to make one’s own choices about how one’s art is structured, how it’s executed, what you want it to do. There is no rulebook that will help you with that, you just have to step up and decide. That’s scary! But there’s no getting around it. — Ann Leckie

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