imo the pov character should be lying to themselves and concealing shit from themselves constantly
interrupting others who might say something revealing or important, thinking around things, using words like “didn’t” or “doesn’t” or “imagines” to describe actions not taken or half taken, dreaming things and never talking about them or thinking about them during waking hours, lying to people, hiding true feelings, sitting in shadow or low light to keep any accidental flicker of emotion hidden, writing in obtuse ways that doesn’t let the reader know what they’re thinking or planning, avoiding adverbs in tense moments, describing actions in straightforward and almost clinical ways sometimes, hiding the truth from the character and the reader even though you both know or suspect but there is just enough space there to fill with doubt
You will never 100% idiotproof your creative work & if you try to, you will only succeed in smothering the soul out of it. btw
I like to think of a piece of writing as an environment for thinking, a semicontained space with some wandering-around room—a clearing in the woods, plus a little of the woods, or a house museum.
— Elisa Gabbert, Any Person is the Only Self: Essays (FSG Originals, June 11, 2024)
from why poetry can be hard for most people by dorothea lasky, published in rome
[Text ID: why poetry can be hard for most people. because speaking to the dead is not something you want to do. /End ID]
“I perceive the world in terms of language, as I think any real writer does. From the time I was a kid, even just through reading, I felt that it was like having two lives, like living twice, as some Japanese poet put it. I had the good fortune to have this second infinity, this second universe, inside of me, which I carried around with me. It’s like being in love, like having a wonderful secret. It makes the world radiant. I needed something to make things alive. I found that in my love of poetry. Not just writing it, but in the love of poetry itself. I always thought of writing poetry as an attempt to be part of that company of people who made this reality possible in the world.”
You need to draw and make art or else all the images will stay in your head and you'll get sick
David Shrigley
Julien Baker, Loss Protocol
“The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it…If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write. I’m an old-fashioned writer and, despite the odds, I want to change the world”
— James Baldwin
even when i am not posting, know that horrible sentences are raging within me
maybe we're too sorted out, maybe we'd speak more beautifully if we struggled to know what we were saying, what we were feeling and had to seduce language into getting what we want out of it
this 🤝 vievee francis saying the poem won’t be ruined if you let us in
[ID: tweet from Brian Tierney @/BTTierney85 reading,
"tracy k smith once told me i should strive to end poems by opening a door outward not closing one and now it happily haunts every poem i try to write"
/end ID]
“I do believe in poetry. I believe that there are creatures endowed with the power to put things together and bring them back to life.”
— Helene Cixous, from The Book of Promethea
(tr. by Betsy Wing)
this is almost certainly a post ive made before but when a character's grief is so strong it fully alters the form of the narrative itself... moby dick being so much longer than strictly necessary because ishmael's grief made him stall for time in the telling of the tragedy... harrow the ninth being in second person because harrow was so grief-stricken that she herself was not capable of making narrative sense of the events of the novel and so someone else had to do it.... do u know what i mean
ok WAIT. SO TRUE