I WRITE IN ORDER TO ATTAIN THAT FEELING OF TENSION RELIEVED and function achieved that a cow enjoys on giving milk.
- H. L. Mencken
Do you ever get that feeling when you just have to write? Quentin Crisp asserted that there are three reasons for becoming a writer: that money needed to be made; that the writer has something to say; that writing was a way of passing the long winter evenings. Some of us may not hold the position of paid writer. All of us have something to say. Do any of us write just to pass the time?
Yesterday I had a voluminous urge to write. It was an urge to write something. Maybe it had been building up in me for days, weeks, months. Today I read Mencken’s quote and that urge made sense. What a quirky analogy is the need to be milked of words!
If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing!
- Kingsley Amis
You just can’t please all of the people all of the time. Do you need to try? When you have to write, you have to write. Don’t hold back. Literary constipation ensues otherwise. What a lovely analogy in itself. What a joke within a joke. Don’t hold back. Don’t care. Write your picture of the world because no-one else will.
If I were on a desert island and knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing? My answer is most emphatically yes, I would go on writing for company, because I’m creating an imaginary – it’s always imaginary – world in which I would like to live.
- William Burroughs
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common: a need to create an alternative world.
- John Fowles
Welcome to my world (if anyone is reading this right now). How do you know when a tree falls in a forest? Who cares? Write and be milked. Lay it out in all its glorious overflow of mixed metaphors and stupendous assumptions; a ridiculous splurge of just what tastes good. Enjoy it. It enjoys being written. Feel the tension ease and watch what the function of tapping or scribbling away has produced. It’s yours.
I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.
- Toni Morrison
Anything that is written to please the author is worthless.
- Blaise Pascal
Don’t follow leaders, walking parking meters.
- Bob Dylan
Draw your own conclusions.
– Carter O’Reilly
If you want to avoid stress, keep writing when you feel you are in stress. Try it!
Sound advice, Maria.
- Ed.