“The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” -Victor Shklovsky
Yesterday, feeling unable to write, I enlisted the girls in a major decluttering attack on our playroom. The result was that I carried several boxes of detritus out to my writing cabin, and made a huge mess. That’s okay. Today I’ll work on that. Here’s a quote I found in Barbara Abercrombie’s A Year of Writing Dangerously:
“The essential question is, ‘Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?’ Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words your characters will speak, ideas–inspiration.” -Doris Lessing
Yesterday our family was shattered by the news of the death of my niece, who was about the same age as my older daughters. Last night, feeling aimless and bereaved, I wandered out to my writing cabin and picked up Katherine Paterson’s book of essays, Gates of Excellence. She had this solace for me, and maybe for you, too.
“It might have happened sooner had I had a room of my own and fewer children, but somehow I doubt it. For as I look back on what I have written, I can see that the very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.” -Katherine Paterson
“You cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind.” –Anonymous
“To make a great dream come true, the first requirement is a great capacity to dream; the second is persistence.”
–Cesar Chavez
Or we have this advice:
Poem #1755
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.–Emily Dickinson