More notes from the blue notebook:  

I just came across some quotes from Gotham Writer's Workshop:

• "The fiction writer takes a fragment of reality and examines it from several angles until it starts to make some damn sense."
• "If you want to be a great writer and you have a choice between being brilliant and lazy, or being clueless but motivated, choose the latter."
• "Figure out why you like what you like, then try to utilize some of the techniques that will help you get there."
• "Plot makes fiction coherent by drawing together all teh characters, settings, voice, and everything else around a single, organizing force."
• "Works of fiction are not, and cannot be, about a million things -- they are usually about just one thing. And that thing, the force that draws everything together in a successful piece of fiction, is a single, pressing question.
  

So, you see, some of my noes are more interesting than others. I especially liked #2, and I don't know why I wrote #4 down at all...

Notes from The Writing Workshop Notebook, by Alan Ziegler

I have the ability to obsess about almost anything, and you get TWO GUESSES what I am obsessing about right now...

I found some quotes in my blue notebook from another book: The Writing Workshop Notebook, by Alan Ziegler, and I thought they would be appropriate to share. What I do is I write down stuff that strikes me as I'm reading all these writing books (and let me repeat that if reading about writing were a predictor of writing success, I would be next in line for a best-selling novel...), so here's what I wrote down February 2010:

I think the chapter must have been about journaling and why one should journal. Which I don't, by the way...

• "The very act of memorializing observations, events and imaginings contributes to the skills integral to one's identity and growth as a writer..."
• "Some writers fear their creativity is non-renewable and they may run out of material. But as you create, seeds get dropped along the way for later cultivation."  (translation by S Pallotta: So just write for goodness' sake! Eventually something will come of it!)
• "Your pen or keyboard is the mill, and the whole world is grist. Through writing, you perceive, illuminate, and interpret what goes on internally and externally... You look for material with your eyes and mind's eye and listen with your ears and mind's ear. That's the writer's edge: three eyes and three ears."

The message?  Write, write, write.