Clean air, clean water, green trees, beaches, mountains, birds soaring through the sky. I love this planet Earth. It’s our home. It’s the home we will leave to our children. Taking good care of our planet is a wonderful legacy to give to our children.
ideas
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ The Basic Tool of the Writer: Language
“In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who’s sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer’s attitude toward the particular story he’s decided to tell.” Donald Westlake
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Write, Write Every Day
“How do you write? You write, man, you write, that’s how, and you do it the way the old English walnut tree puts forth leaf and fruit every year by the thousands. … If you practice an art faithfully, it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.” ~ William Saroyan
💡 Something to Think About
There is wisdom in the saying, “when one door closes, another opens.” Losing something important hurts and sometimes the hurt is deep and lasting. If we hold on, we’ll find that another door has opened and it is waiting for us to walk through.
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Write What You Know
Writers on Writing
“Write what you know. Every guide for the aspiring author advises this. Because I live in a long-settled rural place, I know certain things. I know the feel of a newborn lamb’s damp, tight-curled fleece and the sharp sound a well-bucket chain makes as it scrapes on stone. But more than these material things, I know the feelings that flourish in small communities. And I know other kinds of emotional truths that I believe apply across the centuries.” (July 2001) ~ Geraldine Brooks
💡 Something to Think About
Thunderstorms are predicted for this part of south Texas over the next few days. We need the rain. The Texas sun baked the ground. Without the rain and storms, we wouldn’t enjoy the sun. Without the hot sunny days, we wouldn’t enjoy the rain. That’s the way it is with life. Sometimes, it takes missing something to appreciate what we had.
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Approaching the Act of Writing
“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair — the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.” —Stephen King , On Writing
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ You are Your Experience; It Shapes Your Writing
“A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
~ Jorge Luis Borges, Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges, Including a Selection of Poems : Interviews by Roberto Alifano, 1981–1983
💡 Something to Think About
Some things we take for granted until we no longer have them like good health, friendship, and love. When we lose them we experience a great emptiness. Nurture your health, friendships, and those you love. The payoff is better than anything the stock market can give you.
✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ The Task of Writing
“You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.”
