Let's talk about things, mostly writing.
“The only communications truly without influence are those that one learns to ignore or never hears at all; this is why Jacques Ellul argued that it is only the disconnected—rural dwellers or the urban poor—who are truly immune to propaganda, while intellectuals, who read everything, insist on having opinions, and think themselves immune to propaganda are, in fact, easy to manipulate.”
Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants
“Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.”
Ray Bradbury
“Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer’s will to live.”
Don DeLillo, Mao II
“You have to put in the time. If you are not there, the words will not appear. Simple as that.
A writer is not someone who thinks obsessively about writing, or talks about it, or plans it, or dissects it, or even reveres it: a writer is the one who puts his arse in the chair when the last thing he wants to do is have his arse in the chair.”
Colm McCann, So You Want to be a Writer?
“Abandon the idea of predetermination, the shaping force of your intention, until you’ve given it up for good. Bring your intentions, by all means, but accept that the language we use is a language of accidentals, always skewing away from the course we set. This is not something to mourn but to revel in – not only for the friction and sideslip inherent in the language but for freeing us from the narrowness of our preconceptions.”
Several Short Sentences About Writing (p.109), Verlyn Klinkenborg
“I’m repeatedly asked how I write, what my “process” is. My answer is simple: I think patiently, trying out sentences in my head. That is the root of it. What happens on paper or at the keyboard is only distantly connected. The virtue of working this way is that circumstances — time, place, tools — make no difference whatsoever. All I need is my head. All I need is the moments I have.
There’s no magic here. Practice these things, and you’ll stop fearing what happens when it’s time to make sentences worth inscribing. You’ll no longer feel as though a sentence is a glandular secretion from some cranial inkwell that’s always on the verge of drying up. You won’t be able to say precisely where sentences come from — there is no where there — but you’ll know how to wait patiently as they emerge and untangle themselves. You’ll discover the most important thing your education left out: how to trust and value your own thinking. And you’ll also discover one of things writing is for: pleasure.”
Where Do Sentences Come From?, Verlyn Klinkenborg
“All real living hurts as well as fulfils. Happiness comes when we have lived and have a respite for sheer forgetting. Happiness, in the vulgar sense, is just a holiday experience. The life-long happiness lies in being used by life, hurt by life, driven by life and goaded by life, replenished and overjoyed with life, fighting for life’s sake. That is real happiness. In the undergoing, a large part of it is pain.”
D.H Lawrence, The Boy in the Bush
“One day not too long ago I sat down at the desk, determined to sit there until at least one thought clarified itself sufficiently to serve the essay I was writing. I failed. Next day I sat down again. Again, I failed. Three days later, same thing. But the day after that the fog cleared out of my head. I solved a simple writing problem, one that had seemed intractable, and a stone rolled off my chest. Once again, and perhaps for the 4000th time since leaving analysis, I thanked the daily effort, my gratitude profuse. I saw what by now I’d seen many times before: It wasn’t the writing itself that was everything, it was sitting down to it every day that was everything. It’s the miserable daily effort that is everything. It is when I am honoring it that I become a woman still set on inhabiting a serious life.” (emphasis mine)
Vivian Gornick, A Serious Woman (cited in Mason Currey’s Subtle Maneuvers newsletter)
“We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
In a political context, what could this “slippery ice” be?
Could we be too comfortable, sedated even, with the amount of “content” available to us that we never question the state of things?
“If you can approach your daily life in this way for a while – as a sequence of momentary, self-contained, eminently doable actions, rather than as an arduous matter of chipping away at enormous challenges – you might notice something profound, which is that, in fact, this is all you ever need to do. You can make your way through life exclusively in this manner. (As E. L. Doctorow said of writing, it’s “like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”) And not just that: actually, it’s all you ever could do. There is no achievement, in the history of human civilisation, that has ever been accomplished by any means other than as a sequence of doable actions.
In the end, it isn’t really a question of “breaking big projects down into small chunks.” It’s more a matter of seeing that “big projects” are nothing but psychological constructs, quasi-illusory entities summoned into existence by taking a particular view of what our lives really consist of – which is moments, and the actions that unfold in them.”
Oliver Burkeman, The Imperfectionist (“How to get out of a rut”)