“
Rejection is an opportunity for your selection.
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Bernard Branson
“
Imagination is not bound by possibilities. The creative mind will always break the shackles—making the impossible, possible.
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C. Toni Graham
“
Inspiration ignites the spark of magic. Creativity is magic.
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C. Toni Graham
“
A city is a place where interesting always beats beautiful.
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Megan Harlan (Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays (The Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction))
“
At a certain point I need to go wandering. My feet need to hit earth, again and again, that bone-filling drumbeat. I need the sky's colored threads to tangle inside me, pull me somewhere new.
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Megan Harlan (Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays (The Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction))
“
I need the sky's colored threads to tangle inside me, pull me somewhere new.
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Megan Harlan (Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays (The Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction))
“
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part.
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Annie Dillard (Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters)
“
People who live with OCD drag a metal sea anchor around. Obsession is a break, a source of drag, not a badge of creativity, a mark of genius or an inconvenient side effect of some greater function.
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David Adam (The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought)
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We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear.
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Kamand Kojouri
“
The real enemy of independent thinking is not an external authority, but our own inertia. The ability to generate new ideas has more to do with breaking with old habits of thinking than with coming up with as many ideas as possible.
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Sönke Ahrens (How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers)
“
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.” (Steve Jobs)
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Sönke Ahrens (How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers)
“
Books mimic adrenaline to the narratively restless: nests of worlds in which the mind takes predestined flights from time and place.
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Megan Harlan (Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays (The Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction))
“
The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we are all prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge." - James Baldwin, "The Creative Process
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James Baldwin (The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985)
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Sometimes a house wants to be your mother. Sometimes a house wants to hide the evidence. Some houses would smother you with good tastefulness, a claustrophobic need to impress. Some houses would like you to calm down already. Some houses want you to get the hell out. Some houses get silly with nostalgia. Some houses are destined for the aftermaths of true love. Some houses couldn’t care less: you might as well be living in generic anywhere. But no one ever is.
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Megan Harlan (Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays (The Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction))
“
Think not of the fragility of life, but of the power of books, when mere words can change our lives simply by being next to each other.
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Kamand Kojouri
“
She might not have read many books. But when she reads a book, she swallows the very words. If you open the books on her shelves, you will find that the front and back covers encase white pages.
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Kamand Kojouri
“
I shut my ears, averted my eyes, turning instead to what I thought at the time was pain's antidote: silence. I was wrong... Silence feeds pain, allows it to fester and thrive. What starves pain, what forces it to release its grip, is speech, the voice upon which rides the story, this is what happened; this is what I have refused to let claim me.
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Tracy K. Smith (Ordinary Light)
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Writing nonfiction means I tell people's stories for them, not because they're special but because we all are.
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Jo Deurbrouck
“
The essay is a modest genre. It doesn't mean to change the world. Instead it says: let me tell you what happened to me.
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Sara Levine (Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present)
“
Why is it deemed justifiable and appropriate for cops/police
officers to kill other cops (friendly–fire) and citizens?
Why do cops kill?
Are they not taught to maim or slow down someone running
or reaching for a weapon?
If not, why not?
Why do cops kill first and ask questions last?
Why are police officers being military trained?
What can we as citizens, taxpayers, and voters do to stop these
killings and beatings of unarmed people?
Why do we let this continue?
How many more must die or get beat up before we realize
something is wrong and needs to be changed?
Will you, a friend, or a family member have to be killed or beaten
by a cop before we realize that things have to change?
Who's here to protect us from the cops when they decide to use
excessive force, shoot multiple shells, and/or murder us?
”
”
Obiora Embry (Expanding Horizons Through Creative Expressions)
“
I am an author of the analytical critique. And because of that, a ton of research is done by me in order to bring an examination into comprehensive being. ("Interviews With Writers," 2018).
”
”
Cat Ellington
“
...my thoughts don't really bump along this way, but they do bump somehow, and it's more honest--more pedagogically useful, more truthful--to arrange them in a loose, disconnected, provisional way than to deliver only the conclusions.
”
”
Sara Levine (Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present)
“
They are suspicious of humanism, nervous about too much style, and wary of public celebrations of the personal.
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”
Sara Levine (Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present)
“
And found there one of those huge comprehensive anthologies of literature, the sort of thing which, on a bad day, can induce an inferiority complex...
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”
Sara Levine (Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present)
“
No doubt he is more than that, but we have no time to inquire.
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”
Sara Levine (Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present)
“
People approach writers, assuming we pull a perfect text out of our nose each time (well spelled). Spelling is the least of it.
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”
Sara Levine (Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present)
“
One makes discoveries about oneself but more often one makes up discoveries.
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”
Sara Levine (Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present)
“
Those who think of themselves as being open-minded are often even more prone to stick to their first understanding as they believe themselves to be without natural prejudices and therefore don’t see the need to counter-balance them. If we think we can ‘hold back’ on interpretation, we are fooling ourselves.
”
”
Sönke Ahrens (How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers)
“
We all share a biology and deep drives, and what we have created---civilization, courtesy, decency---is a mesh that comes from those drives and also contains and tames them. Whatever feels good is not necessarily good. But what I learn is whatever is bad is not necessarily alien to me. Or to you.
”
”
Charles Bowden (Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present)
“
The extent of creativity to which I admire in an individual is his ability to be richly creative while still, in a way, telling the truth. It is the fool who creates only his own lies, and the bore who simply repeats what he is told.
”
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Criss Jami (Healology)
“
The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that's not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is YOU. Your voice, your mind your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.
”
”
Neil Gaiman (The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction)
“
Writer David Foster Wallace said that he thought good nonfiction was a chance to “watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.” Amateurs fit the same bill: They’re just regular people who get obsessed by something and spend a ton of time thinking out loud about it.
”
”
Austin Kleon (Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered (Austin Kleon))
“
I began to write because of love. I wrote to understand what I felt and what I knew.
”
”
Kamand Kojouri
“
Humans must be skeptics in order to find truth. Because there is always something that lies beneath…
”
”
Maria Karvouni (The Impossible Proof Of Knowing Nothing)
“
We all share a biology and deep drives, and what we have created -- civilization, courtesy, decency -- is a mesh that comes from those drives and also contains and tames them. Whatever feels good is not necessarily good. But what I learn is whatever is bad is not necessarily alien to me. Or to you.
”
”
Charles Bowden (Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present)
“
They have access to your brain, they have access to your body. They hack your brain, they hack your body to make you think certain things, to make you do certain things. To extract thoughts. Invisibly. But nothing is reliable.
”
”
Maria Karvouni (Reality Is Just A Possible Fantasy)
“
The presence in a memoir or an essay of the truth speaker - the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience - it was about this alone that I felt I had something to say; and it was to those works in which such a narrator comes through strong and clear that I was invariably drawn.
”
”
Vivian Gornick (The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative)
“
Own the books you read. Also poems, stories, flash fiction, plays, memoirs, movies, creative nonfiction, and all the rest. ... take ownership of your reading. It's yours. It's special. It is exactly like nobody else's in the whole world.
”
”
Thomas C. Foster (How to Read Literature Like a Professor)
“
Dedicate (donate, give all) your life to something larger than yourself and pleasure - to the largest thing you can: to God, to relieving suffering, to contributing to knowledge, to adding to literature, or something else. Happiness lies this way, and it beats pleasure hollow.
”
”
Annie Dillard (In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction)
“
New freedoms surface old habits. I haven't left sin behind, only discovered a new medium for my treachery. My real trouble as a writer isn't trying to mean the words that I write. It's living into the words that I mean. Nonfiction writing can feel like the high art of hypocrisy.
”
”
Jen Pollock Michel (Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith)
“
She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable. She liked hotel rooms, thick towels, cashmere sweaters, silk dresses, oxfords, brunch, fine stationery, overpriced conditioner, bouquets of gerbera, hats, postage stamps, art monographs, maranta plants, PBS documentaries, challah, soy candles, and yoga. She liked receiving a canvas tote bag when she gave to a charitable cause. She was an avid reader (of fiction and nonfiction), but she never read the newspaper, other than the arts sections, and she felt guilty about this. Dov often said she was bourgeois. He meant it as an insult, but she knew that she probably was. Her parents were bourgeois, and she adored them, so, of course, she had turned out bourgeois, too. She wished she could get a dog, but Dov’s building didn’t allow them.
”
”
Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
“
If you stay long enough in a city, it reverberates inside you as both a celebration and a mourning.
”
”
Sneha Subramanian Kanta
“
The more time an artist devotes to learning about an aesthetic “problem,” the more unexpected and creative his solution will be regarded later by art experts
”
”
Sönke Ahrens (How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers)
“
Thinking and creativity can flourish under restricted conditions and there are plenty of studies to back that claim
”
”
Sönke Ahrens (How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers)
“
Strive to be beyond what others perceive you to be, by striving beyond the limits of yourself.
”
”
Debbie Tosun Kilday (No Limits: How I Beat The Slots)
“
The truth is the truth. It does not need proof. Only lies need proof. And fake one.
”
”
Maria Karvouni (The Impossible Proof Of Knowing Nothing)
“
The biggest threat to creativity and scientific progress is therefore the opposite: a lack of structure and restrictions. Without structure, we cannot differentiate, compare or experiment with ideas.
”
”
Sönke Ahrens (How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers)
“
For every work of fiction, the author inserts a bit of themself to make the story seem more real. For every work of nonfiction, the edges of reality must be blurred creatively to keep the reader's interest.
”
”
A.K. Wallace
“
The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.
”
”
Vivian Gornick (The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative)
“
They make you as they are because it’s the only thing they know and then they tell you it’s your fault because they are jealous you are better than them. But the truth is it’s never your fault. It’s their fault
”
”
Maria Karvouni (You Are Always Innocent)
“
You can write with clarity and with flair, too. And though the emphasis is on nonfiction, the explanations should be useful to fiction writers as well, because many principles of style apply whether the world being written about is real or imaginary. I like to think they might also be helpful to poets, orators, and other creative wordsmiths, who need to know the canons of pedestrian prose to flout them for rhetorical effect.
”
”
Steven Pinker (The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century)
“
Why would I what?” Will asked, wanting another bite of his burger. “Why would you risk your job teaching some stupid fantasy book?” “Because alternative universe literature promotes critical thinking, imagination, empathy, and creative problem solving. Children who are fluent in fiction are more able to interpret nonfiction and are better at understanding things like basic cause and effect, sociology, politics, and the impact of historical events on current events. Many of our technological advances were imagined by science fiction writers before the tech became available to create them, and many of today’s inventors were inspired by science fiction and fantasy to make a world more like the world in the story. Many of today’s political conundrums were anticipated by science fiction writers like Orwell, Huxley, and Heinlein, and sci-fi and fantasy tackle ethical problems in a way that allows people to analyze the problem with some emotional remove, which is important because the high emotions are often what lead to violence. Works like Harry Potter tackle the idea of abuse of power and—” Will stopped himself and swallowed. Everybody at the table, including Kenny, was staring at him in openmouthed surprise. “Anyway,” he said before taking a monster bite of his cooling hamburger on a sudden attack of nerves, “iss goomfer umf.” “It’s good for us,” Kenny translated, sounding a little stunned
”
”
Amy Lane (Shiny!)
“
People oppose you when you uncomfort them… When you don't reciprocate their actions. Or when you point their guilt. They tell bad things about you exaggerating. You can tell more bad things about them but you don't do it… to be positive
”
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Maria Karvouni (You Are Always Innocent)
“
A great physicist taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He published many important books and papers. Often he had an idea in the middle of the night. He rose from his bed, took a shower, washed his hair, and shaved. He dressed completely, in a clean shirt, in polished shoes, a jacket and tie. Then he sat at his desk and wrote down his idea. A friend of mine asked him why he put himself through all that rigmarole. 'Why,' he said, surprised at the question, 'in honor of physics!
”
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Annie Dillard (In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction)
“
Reality is secretly causing a fatal earthquake to your rival neighbor and then send help to them.
Reality is declaring you destroyed a rival balloon that collects communication signals when it is actually yours.
Reality is causing a pandemic and blame your rival for it.
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Maria Karvouni (Reality Is Just A Possible Fantasy)
“
It is more probable they will tell you bad or wrong things about me. For many reasons: inferiority or imperfection. They might tell you I am dead. They might tell you it is not me. Question everything they tell you about me. Verify who they are. Do not believe anything about me. Try to find me to ask me.
”
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Maria Karvouni
“
We made the choice, right there in our local coffee shop, that we were going to do things differently. We were going to put the story first, no matter where that led us. We’d open ourselves up to all genres, all forms. We’d publish works that stayed with us in an intangible way, long after that last page is turned.
”
”
Dani Hedlund
“
The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that's not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is YOU. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.t
”
”
Neil Gaiman (The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction)
“
On one hand, those with wandering, defocused, childlike minds seem to be the most creative; on the other, it seems to be analysis and application that’s important. The answer to this conundrum is that creative people need both … The key to creativity is being able to switch between a wide-open, playful mind and a narrow analytical frame.
”
”
Sönke Ahrens (How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers)
“
Even though consciousness doesn’t seem to be confined to the human brain within the skull, we do experience consciousness through our brain. The transformation of consciousness to attention is facilitated by your brain. Driving thoughts into action is also processed by your brain. Your brain is the seat of the creative observer inside you.
”
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Ilchi Lee (Change: Realizing Your Greatest Potential)
“
The controversy over resurrection, then, proved critical in shaping the Christian movement into an institutional religion. All Christians agreed in principle that only Christ himself—or God—can be the ultimate source of spiritual authority. But the immediate question, of course, was the practical one: Who, in the present, administers that authority? Valentinus and his followers answered: Whoever comes into direct, personal contact with the “living One.” They argued that only one’s own experience offers the ultimate criterion of truth, taking precedence over all secondhand testimony and all tradition—even gnostic tradition! They celebrated every form of creative invention as evidence that a person has become spiritually alive. On this theory, the structure of authority can never be fixed into an institutional framework: it must remain spontaneous, charismatic, and open.
”
”
The Gnostic Gospels (Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction Books)
“
In his book Real Presences, George Steiner asks us to "imagine a society in which all talk about the arts, music and literature is prohibited." In such a society there would be no more essays on whether Hamlet was mad or only pretending to be, no reviews of the latest exhibitions or novels, no profiles of writers or artists. There would be no secondary, or parasitic, discussion - let alone tertiary: commentary on commentary. We would have, instead, a "republic for writers and readers" with no cushion of professional opinion-makers to come between creators and audience. While the Sunday papers presently serve as a substitute for the experiencing of the actual exhibition or book, in Steiner's imagined republic the review pages would be turned into listings:catalogues and guides to what is about to open, be published, or be released.
What would this republic be like? Would the arts suffer from the obliteration of this ozone of comment? Certainly not, says Steiner, for each performance of a Mahler symphony is also a critique of that symphony. Unlike the reviewer, however, the performer "invests his own being in the process of interpretation." Such interpretation is automatically responsible because the performer is answerable to the work in a way that even the most scrupulous reviewer is not.
Although, most obviously, it is not only the case for drama and music; all art is also criticism. This is most clearly so when a writer or composer quotes or reworks material from another writer or composer. All literature, music, and art "embody an expository reflection which they pertain". In other words it is not only in their letters, essays, or conversation that writers like Henry James reveal themselves also to be the best critics; rather, The Portrait of a Lady is itself, among other things, a commentary on and a critique of Middlemarch. "The best readings of art are art."
No sooner has Steiner summoned this imaginary republic into existence than he sighs, "The fantasy I have sketched is only that." Well, it is not. It is a real place and for much of the century it has provided a global home for millions of people. It is a republic with a simple name: jazz.
”
”
Geoff Dyer (But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz)
“
Read non-fiction. History, biology, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology. Get a bodyguard and do fieldwork. Find your inner fish. Don't publish too soon. Not before you have read Thomas Mann in any case. Learn by copying, sentence by sentence some of the masters. Copy Coetzee's or Sebald's sentences and see what happens to your story. Consider creative non-fiction if you want to stay in South Africa. It might be the way to go. Never neglect back and hamstring exercises, otherwise you won't be able to write your novel. One needs one's buttocks to think.
”
”
Marlene van Niekerk
“
Other animals are exceptionally good at identifying and reacting to predators, rivals and friends. They never act as if they believe that rivers or trees are inhabited by spirits who are watching. In all these ways, other animals continually demonstrate their working knowledge that they live in a world brimming with other minds as well as their knowledge of those minds' boundaries. their understanding seems more acute, pragmatic, and frankly, better than ours at distinguishing real from fake. So, I wonder, do humans really have a better developed Theory of Mind than other animals? ...Children talk to dolls for years, half believing or firmly believing that the doll hears and feels and is a worthy confidante. Many adults pray to statues, fervently believing that they're listening. ...All of this indicates a common human inability to distinguish conscious minds from inanimate objects, and evidence from nonsense. Children often talk to a fully imaginary friends whom they believe listens and has thoughts. Monotheism might be the adult version. ...In the world's most technologically advanced, most informed societies, a majority people take it for granted that disembodied spirits are watching, judging, and acting on them. Most leaders of modern nations trust that a Sky-God can be asked to protect their nation during disasters and conflicts with other nations. All of this is theory of mind gone wild, like an unguided fire hose spraying the whole universe with presumed consciousness. Humans' "superior" Theory of Mind is in part pathology. The oft repeated line "humans are rational beings" is probably our most half-true assertion about ourselves. There is in nature an overriding sanity and often in humankind an undermining insanity. We, among all animals, are most frequently irrational, distortional, delusional, and worried. Yet, I also wonder, is our pathological ability to generate false beliefs...also the very root of human creativity?
”
”
Carl Safina (Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel)
“
WRITING GUIDES AND REFERENCES: A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY The Artful Edit, by Susan Bell (Norton) The Art of Time in Memoir, by Sven Birkerts (Graywolf Press) The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard (Harper & Row) Writing with Power, by Peter Elbow (Oxford University Press) Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard (Story Press) Tough, Sweet and Stuffy, by Walker Gibson (Indiana University Press) The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life, by Walt Harrington (Sage) On Writing, by Stephen King (Scribner) Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (Plume) Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott (Pantheon) The Forest for the Trees, by Betsy Lerner (Riverhead) Unless It Moves the Human Heart, by Roger Rosenblatt (Ecco) The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White (Macmillan) Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner (Princeton University Press) Word Court, by Barbara Wallraff (Harcourt) Style, by Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb (Longman) On Writing Well, by William Zinsser (Harper & Row) The Chicago Manual of Style, by University of Chicago Press staff (University of Chicago Press) Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler, revised edition by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford University Press) Modern American Usage, by Wilson Follett (Hill and Wang) Words into Type, by Marjorie E. Skillin and Robert M. Gay (Prentice-Hall) To CHRIS, SAMMY, NICK, AND MADDIE, AND TO TOMMY, JAMIE, THEODORE, AND PENNY
”
”
Tracy Kidder (Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction)
“
On the Craft of Writing: The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by Shawn Coyne The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White 2K to 10K: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love by Rachel Aaron On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing by Libbie Hawker You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) by Jeff Goins Prosperity for Writers: A Writer's Guide to Creating Abundance by Honorée Corder The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield Business for Authors: How To Be An Author Entrepreneur by Joanna Penn On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark On Mindset: The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan The Art of Exceptional Living by Jim Rohn Vision to Reality: How Short Term Massive Action Equals Long Term Maximum Results by Honorée Corder The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg Mckeown Mastery by Robert Greene The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer The Game of Life and How to Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy Taking Life Head On: How to Love the Life You Have While You Create the Life of Your Dreams by Hal Elrod Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill In
”
”
Hal Elrod (The Miracle Morning for Writers: How to Build a Writing Ritual That Increases Your Impact and Your Income, Before 8AM)
“
Human beings innate complexities resist reduction into simple sentences and neat paragraphs. The stories that come nearest to expressing the ambivalent nature of people are textured and occasionally inconsistent and express waves of inner uncertainty. A simile and a metaphor are not literally true. A figure of speech, symbols, and allegories are mere expressions that when interlinked with other text assist explain facts, ideas, and emotions. Useful facts are elusive; we must look for them, and then express them using whatever mechanism proves most authoritative. We can never directly describe emotions; we resort to metaphors to describe emotions and other illusive thoughts. Ideas by virtue of their untested nature are often untrue or at best rough approximations of truth. Lyrical writing is equivocal; it is never exactly true or precisely false. Lyrical language attempts to express and connect sentiments through extrapolation and misdirection. The writer’s task is to melt away durable facts, breakdown the symbolic depictions of solid reality, and discover the liquidity of a passionate inner life that provides the hot breath to our steamy humanness.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
The Positive Paradigm is:
. . . a new, inclusive reality map, one people worldwide can easily comprehend and agree upon. It is equally compatible with scriptures and science, bridging the gap between them. It fulfills Einstein's intuited search for the Unified Field Theory, picturing how all parts of creation are related, interwoven and interdependent.
Working with the Positive Paradigm empowers the "substantially new manner of thinking," which, Einstein said, is necessary "if mankind is to survive."
For thousands of years, this genesis formula, the very heart of the creative process, was hidden as the secret treasure of initiates. Its knowledge was transmitted exclusively to qualified students in the inner circles of monastic schools. When Einstein intuited the theory of relativity and made it available to the general public, its long-foreseen abuse materialized. To Einstein's horror, it was misused to explode atomic bombs.
This context justifies making the positive application of Einstein's inspired vision equally public now. For in its traditional context, this three-part formula is an essential piece of the knowledge puzzle. It has the powerful potential to offset earlier abuse with opposite and equally unifying results. A timely shift to the Positive Paradigm could tip the scales of history in favor of human survival.
p. 11.
”
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Patricia E. West (Rethinking Survival: Getting to the Positive Paradigm of Change)
“
Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can be elegant and very beautiful but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts—or predetermined forms—it cannot fly. Excepting those masters who transcend their craft—great medieval and Renaissance artisans, for example, or nameless artisans of traditional cultures as far back as the caves who were also spontaneous unselfconscious artists.
As in fiction, the nonfiction writer is telling a story, and when that story is well-made, the placement of details and events is never random. The parts are not strung out in a line but come around full circle, like a necklace, to set off the others. They resonate, rekindle one another, stirring the reader with a cumulative effect. A good essay or article can and should have all the attributes of a good short story, including structure and design, pacing and effective placement of its parts—almost all the attributes of fiction except the creative imagination, which can never be permitted to enliven fact. The writer of nonfiction is stuck with objective reality, or should be; how his facts are arranged and presented is where his craft appears, and it can be dazzling when the writer is a good one. The best nonfiction has many, many virtues, among which simple truthfulness is perhaps foremost, yet its fidelity to the known facts is its fatal constraint.
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Peter Matthiessen
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creativity.
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Nathan Meunier (Write Short Kindle Books: A Self-Publishing Manifesto for Non-Fiction Authors (Indie Author Success #1))
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Objective motives and subjective compulsions that incite a person to write is the decisive element in defining the writer’s unique voice. Anyone who does not understand oneself or is unwilling to ferret out their own buried, true identity and publicly unmask the hidden stranger that resides within us all will never be a person who can bridge a connection with other people who share similar thoughts, feelings, wants, and needs. Lacking critical discernment, this want-a-be writer will remain a cosseted imposter, playing a coldhearted game of charades. If a person is unwilling to peel back the craggy mask that we conceal ourselves behind and explore the seeds of inner awareness wrapped inside the enigma of doubt engulfing all people, one can still aim to be a writer of nonfiction or technical journals. Creative writing, in sharp contrast, is for the intrepid cliff dwellers, the recluses willing to mine the soft belly of their internal psychosis.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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Writer David Foster Wallace said that he thought good nonfiction was a chance to “watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.
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Austin Kleon (Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered (Austin Kleon))
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In realtà, ogni momento della nostra vita è creazione; per un essere cosciente, "esistere" significa cambiare; cambiare nel maturarsi; e maturarsi nel creare se stesso all'infinito.
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Henri Bergson (Creative Evolution)
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Airplanes were a novel sight on the island, and each time one flew low, the Sansegoti cowered and trembled. The whir of Spitfires circled above their heads like a swarm of killer bees. The Germans shot at them and the planes flew away, but they always came back—until they bombed the cannery.
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Antonia Burgato
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Getting married and trying to conform to societies standards did not work. No one can cut a part of who they are out completely and expect to be successful. It is when I found my creative voice refusing to be silenced that things started moving forward again.
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Jessica Marie Baumgartner
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Write to make a difference. Write because you have something to say to us all. In dramatic writing, fiction, and nonfiction, this means knowing exactly what your work is about and being able to tell the publisher in ten words or less. The writing must demonstrate its premise in a convincing, persuasive way. Keep your audience in mind, their needs and their desires. Journalists do this by focusing on the 5 W’s (Who, What, When, Where, Why) because they know what their readers look for. Convey emotion, break out of your academic inhibitions and psychological barriers. William Faulkner hints at this when he says, “Writing is a craft consisting of pen, paper, and whiskey.” The purpose of the whiskey is to rid the author of inhibitions.
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Kenneth Atchity (Write Time: Guide to the Creative Process, from Vision through Revision—and Beyond)
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Within that single fifteen-month period—perhaps the most creative in American literary history—Grant would not only write his Personal Memoirs, Twain would reach the peak of his career with the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Those two books, perhaps the finest work of American nonfiction ever written and the greatest of all American novels, defined their legacy.
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Mark Perry (Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship That Changed America)
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Unfortunately no one knows anything and everyone has to know something to live anything which makes all people irrational and illogical more or less if they are not able to doubt everything. Evil minds take advantage of it to deceive even when it seems impossible there is deceit. They turn anyone against anyone but themselves and in the end they are the only ones favored. Immorality should not reproduce.
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Maria Karvouni
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They use virtual reality of every day devices and things through hacking them and invisibly connecting them to your body and brain to create fake interactions between you and unknown people for deceit purposes.
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Maria Karvouni (Reality Is Just A Possible Fantasy)
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…Impossible to find truth. Not because nothing can be found… There are advanced systems of deceit & self-deceit… Any impossible solution is inadequate. Call it time travel, teleportation, mind-body reading, AI detection.
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Maria Karvouni (The Impossible Proof Of Knowing Nothing)
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They manipulate weather and send a lightning to a specific area or they shock electrically the target person. They enter the human body through electricity and they either cause illness or death or read the thoughts of the mind or alter the behavior.
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Maria Karvouni (Reality Is Just A Possible Fantasy)
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Once I believed in reality. Now I don't know what to believe anymore. I even doubt the environment thing. Do they want to spread electricity to be able to sabotage & kill silently anyone posing "threat" to their "good" fame?
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Maria Karvouni (Reality Is Just A Possible Fantasy)
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Professionals with in depth knowledge should be treated as highly suspects of crimes creating false realities. Doctors for "natural" deaths and false diagnoses. Lawyers and judges for deceit. Detectives for illegal and abusive means.
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Maria Karvouni (Reality Is Just A Possible Fantasy)
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The justice system is corrupted and not reliable. It is exploited for hate, revenge with lies, deceit. It is method, pattern from the knowledgeable guilty against the unprotected innocents. Do not consider any claim or conviction as valid.
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Maria Karvouni (You Are Always Innocent)
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Wrong assumptions occur from limited knowledge. A person should have a complete view before shaping an opinion about someone or something…
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Maria Karvouni (The Impossible Proof Of Knowing Nothing)
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Justice is a criminal circuit that rapes innocents with electricity framing them as guilty… Never take part in legal procedures! You do not need laws to be ethical! Only criminals need laws! To condemn innocents & break them invisibly!
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Maria Karvouni (You Are Always Innocent)
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Start believing in conspiracies, because those who have the power conspire, and they keep their power by having people not believing in conspiracies
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Maria Karvouni (The Impossible Proof Of Knowing Nothing)
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Justice through injustice is not genuine justice. It's injustice perpetuated.
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Maria Karvouni (You Are Always Innocent)
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Reality is a cover up method of pretending and in the backstage repeating all the faults of human history: torture, murders, inequality, injustice, unfairness. They make you hail them, condemn their opponents and then they kill you.
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Maria Karvouni (Reality Is Just A Possible Fantasy)
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They remotely stimulate the private parts to make you look pervert. They talk in the head to make you seem mentally ill. They register thoughts as your own but they are from a program you watch on tv.
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Maria Karvouni (Reality Is Just A Possible Fantasy)
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[...] For those who think (create), reality has no mysteries. The underlying notion of reality is a creative process attributable to the Absolute, going to transform the immutability characteristic of identity into a "dynamic" concept". For Bergson, "existence is the victory over nothing", while the non-being, according to logic, is not, by its very definition. Perhaps, the priority of humankind shall be understanding thoroughly the idea of nothing, in order to properly define the borders and limits of being.
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Vincent Bozzino (Philosophy Trips: A Naive's Guide)
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Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas—abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken—and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, talks of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created. —Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
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Alyssa Archer (Tell Your Story: 450 Creative Writing Prompts to Inspire Your Fiction, Memoir, and Nonfiction Stories)
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Over the years I have written creative non-fiction related to the curricula I produced, first as an elementary school art instructor, then for nearly two decades as a museum education curator. While any curriculum I wrote was based on facts as well as best and accepted practices, to add imaginative interest and encourage my students’ engagement I put those facts in the context of stories, invented situations that brought to life the remote or unfamiliar
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Susan Bass Marcus
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Who am I, and why? This is the question that writers of personal nonfiction must ask of themselves. Like other forms of art, the writing of memoirs and personal essays should be a journey of discovery. If we believe that we know the answer to the question before we sit down to write, we will learn nothing new about ourselves and, worse, our readers will be denied the opportunity to learn something new about themselves. Readers of your nonfiction should come away knowing more about themselves than they do about you.
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Sean Prentiss (The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre: An Anthology of Explorations in Creative Nonfiction)
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Writing is a solitary act—but it's only the first act. What comes next is what really matters. However, personally, I have never been all that comfortable with the second act. I'm a solitary person by nature and not much of a joiner. Yet still I've come to see the nonfiction writer's solitary act as important to the greater cause—really the only cause—of decreasing cruelty and increasing sympathy. In that service, nonfiction writers can perform two fundamental tasks that are unavailable to the writers of fiction. Like Florence Reece, we can bear witness and we can call for change—for an end to injustices. It is precisely on this subject of bearing witness that I find John D'Agata's recent writing about the genre of nonfiction so malicious and inept. D'Agata argues that nonfiction must serve the greater good of art, and therefore reality can be altered in the name of art. But to elevate reality to the level of art is one of the fundamental tasks of the nonfiction writer, and to say it cannot be done honestly, as D'Agata claims, displays an astonishing lack of imagination as well as an equally unflattering amount of arrogance and pedantry. But let's put aside the either-or nature of this line of thinking. The real problem here is that such an attitude robs nonfiction of it greatest strength and virtue—its ability to bear witness and the veracity that comes from that act. To admit that one only has a passing interest in representing reality is to forfeit one's moral authority to call that reality into question. That is to say, I have no right to call mountaintop removal an injustice—one in need of a new reality—if I cannot be trusted to depict the travesty of strip mining as it now exists. To play D'Agata's game is to lose the reader's trust, and without that, it seems to me that the nonfiction writer has very little left. Writers of that persuasion can align themselves with Picasso's famous sentiment that art is the lie that tells the truth, but I have no truck with such pretentiousness. The work of the nonfiction writers I most admire is telling a truth that exposes a lie.
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Sean Prentiss (The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre: An Anthology of Explorations in Creative Nonfiction)
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...I read the Bible steadily...Even the long, monotonous lists. Even the really weird stuff, most of it so unbelievable as to only be true. I have to say I found it the most compelling piece of creative non-fiction I had ever read. If I sat around for thousands of years, I could never come up with what it proposes, let alone with how intricately Genesis unfolds toward Revelation.
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Carolyn Weber (Surprised by Oxford)
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curriculum committee were not entirely wrong. Death is not a philosophical issue; it is a literary one. And yet, if philosophy
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Lee Gutkind (True Stories, Well Told: From the First 20 Years of Creative Nonfiction Magazine)
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This is new territory; a bridge between the conservative and conventional lit mag tradition and those colourful speculation-driven pamphlets that you find in stacks by the coffee-shop door, full of zombies and vampires and crashing space ships. This is a serious journal with a wide aesthetic.
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The Review of Reviews
Lee Gutkind (You Can't Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction—from Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between)
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Writers’ never-ending quest involves investigating genuineness while carving out narrative nonfiction. They must strive to reach great truths by recounting untold lies with acute enthusiasm. Culmination of a sprawling personal saga is an attempt to flesh out from the ichors of a person’s reptilian instincts and mammalian brain patterns the epicene embodiment of the originator’s dream works intermingled with their actual remembered sensory observations. One unleashes their cache of blood-tinged memories along with an X-ray beam of reminiscent enlightenment to forge a flowing stream of self-consciousness dedicated to the task of hunting out a new way of perceiving, thinking, and communicating.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)