Andrew Sullivan on blogging:
This thing was not an act of writing as such. It was essentially throwing yourself into this mosh pit of universal dyspepsia and amusement. And then, subsequently, extraordinary value because you found that the people out there, the people you write for, are not just passive consumers.
A quote for consideration this morning. From Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within:
Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That’s how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That’s what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else’s skin. Your ability to love another’s writing means those capabilities are awakened in you. It will only make you bigger; it won’t make you a copy cat. The parts of another’s writing that are natural to you will become you, and you will use some of those moves when you write. But not artificially. Great lovers realize that they are what they are in love with.
I’ve been told repeatedly that what you see in other people is a reflection of yourself — you can’t see what you don’t hold within and know, at least, subconsciously.
She posted an awesome manifesto to her site that is worth a read in full.
Here’s an excerpt:
right now:
Someone who is craving to be partnered, to be acknowledged, to ARRIVE, will get precisely what they want — and even more. And because that gift will be so fantastical in it’s reach and sweetness, it will quite magically alter their memory of angsty longing and render it all “So worth the wait.”
Someone has recently cracked open their joyous, genuine nature because they did the hard work of hauling years of oppression off of their psyche — this luminous juju is floating in the ether, and is accessible to you.
Someone just this second wished for world peace, in earnest.
Someone is fighting the fight so that you don’t have to.
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