If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.
--Ray Bradbury
The rule of the writer is not to say what we can all say but what we are unable to say.
--Anais Nin
The world I create in writing compensates for what the real world does not give me.
--Gloria Anzaldua
One of the reasons a writer writes, I think, is that his stories reveal so much he never thought he knew.
--Cecelia Holland
A common thread in all of these quotes...all of them make me think of the emotion thing I've been working on in my fiction. Funny thing is, as I'm going through my ms, asking "what is going on emotionally here?" I know, can sorta feel what the characters are feeling. The hard part is putting it in words, and even harder is putting it in fresh, non-cliche words.
My family didn't do emotions. They were messy, so we just weren't going to have them Later in life, my mother allowed herself to have feelings, and she would also tell us how we felt. Always helpful. Of course, she wasn't on the bullseye, in fact the ol' arrow didn't even hit an outer ring, just went whizzing by. So, when it came time to get married, our pre-marriage counselor gave me a full sheet of little faces with feeling words underneath, like Happy, Perplexed, Depressed, Satisfied, etc. I wore the durn thing out. Now I need to find another copy, for my little characters to use. Can't hurt.
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