Writing Technique Quotes

If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.

You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.

Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

I made a list of skills in which I think every adult should gain a working knowledge. I wouldn't expect you to become a master of any, but mastery isn't necessary. Luck has a good chance of finding you if you become merely good in most of these areas. I'll make a case for each one, but here's the preview list. Public speaking Psychology Business Writing Accounting Design (the basics) Conversation Overcoming Shyness Second language Golf Proper grammar Persuasion Technology ( hobby level) Proper voice technique

We’re all pros already. 1) We show up every day 2) We show up no matter what 3) We stay on the job all day 4) We are committed over the long haul 5) The stakes for us are high and real 6) We accept remuneration for our labor 7) We do not overidentify with our jobs 8 ) We master the technique of our jobs 9) We have a sense of humor about our jobs 10) We receive praise or blame in the real world

The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day--a way of relating.

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.

In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

Learning, thinking, and writing should not be about accumulating knowledge, but about becoming a different person with a different way of thinking. This is done by questioning one’s own thinking routines in light of new experiences and facts.

Before I start a project, I always ask myself the following question. Why is this book worth a year of my life? There needs to be something about the theme, the technique, or the research that makes the time spent on it worthwhile.

The most important advantage of writing is that it helps us confront ourselves when we do not understand something as well as we would like to believe.

You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

It's often about the simple things, isn't it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult.

The very names we use to describe ancient ideas or vanished forms of social organization would be quite meaningless if we had not known living men.

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.

Thenceforth they thought that, rationally concluded, doubt could become an instrument of knowledge.

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)

The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.

I knew nothing about the technique of story writing, and now, after eighteen years of writing, I still know nothing about the technique, although with the publication of my new novel, "Tarzan and the Lost Empire", there are 31 books on my list.

This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law." (Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel, 1949)

When we take permanent notes, it is much more a form of thinking within the medium of writing and in dialogue with the already existing notes within the slip-box

An idea kept private is as good as one you never had. And a fact no one can reproduce is no fact at all.

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It's like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with the energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals - sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

The trick is to maintain a kind of naïve amazement at each instant of experience - but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm.

[I]n adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult readers who do deal in straightforward stories find themselves sidelined into a genre such as crime or science fiction, where no one expects literary craftsmanship. But stories are vital. Stories never fail us, because, as Isaac Bashevis Singer says, "events never grow stale." There's more wisdom in a story than in volumes of philosophy. [Contemporary writers, however,] take up their stories as with a pair of tongs. They're embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do.

As a writer, I like the list of "things to strive for" that Richard Yates kept above his typewriter: genuine clarity genuine feeling the right word the exact English sentence the eloquent detail the rigorous dramatization of story

To be shockingly original with your first novel, you don’t have to discover a new technique: Simply write about people as they are and not as the predominantly liberal and humanist literary establishment believes that they ought to be.

Hear how the use of the wrong word wakes you from your reading spell.

But it’s what I call “The Valley Filled with Clouds” technique. You’re at the edge of the valley, and there is a church steeple, and there is a tree, and there is a rocky outcrop, but the rest of it is mist. But you know that because they exist, there must be ways of getting from one to the other that you cannot see. And so you start the journey. And when I write, I write a draft entirely for myself, just to walk the valley and find out what the book is going to be all about.

We mythologists know very well that myths and legends contain borrowings, moral lessons, nature cycles, and a hundred other distorting influences, and we labor to cut them away and get to what might be a kernel of truth. In fact, these same techniques must be applied to the most sober histories, for no one writes the clear and apparent truth—if such a thing can even be said to exist.

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book. In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness… The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They’re embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do. We need stories so much that we’re even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won’t supply them. We all need stories, but children are more frank about it.

Forget ideas, Mr. Author. What kind of pen do you use?

writing is not only for proclaiming opinions, but the main tool to achieve insight worth sharing.

Good students also look beyond the obvious. They peek over the fences of their own disciplines – and once you have done that, you cannot go back and do what everyone else is doing, even if you now must deal with heterogeneous ideas that come without a manual on how they might fit together

Be daring, take on anything. Don’t labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

Read your paper backward, sentence by sentence, as a final proofreading step. This technique isolates each sentence and makes it easier to spot errors you may have overlooked in previous readings.

Characters in novels sometimes radiate more energy, therefore, when we don’t enter their mind. It is one of the techniques a novelist acquires instinctively—don’t go into your protagonist’s thoughts until you have something to say about his or her inner life that is more interesting than the reader’s suppositions.

When we say that the ancestors of the Blacks, who today live mainly in Black Africa, were the first to invent mathematics, astronomy, the calendar, sciences in general, arts, religion, agriculture, social organization, medicine, writing, technique, architecture; that they were the first to erect buildings out of 6 million tons of stone (the Great Pyramid) as architects and engineers—not simply as unskilled laborers; that they built the immense temple of Karnak, that forest of columns with its famed hypostyle hall large enough to hold Notre-Dame and its towers; that they sculpted the first colossal statues (Colossi of Memnon, etc.)—when we say all that we are merely expressing the plain unvarnished truth that no one today can refute by arguments worthy of the name.

You keep writing because it's the only way to finish the book.

Be in love with everything .

If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution. I had to learn technique and surrender my ignorance.

Being a successful student is about more than reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. It's about being a skilled negotiator, a keen observer, and a master planner.

just one idea per note and force ourselves to be as precise and brief as possible. The restriction to one idea per note is also the precondition to recombine them freely later.

There is a difference between fiction and nonfiction deeper than technique or intention. I value both but genuinely believe that fiction can tell a larger truth.

To have an undistracted brain to think with and a reliable collection of notes to think in is pretty much all we need.

Problems rarely get solved directly, anyway. Most often, the crucial step forward is to redefine the problem in such a way that an already existing solution can be employed.

Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

While extroverts tend to attain leadership in public domains, introverts tend to attain leadership in theoretical and aesthetic fields. Outstanding introverted leaders, such as Charles Darwin, Maurie Curie, Patrick White and Arthur Boyd, who have created either new fields of thought or rearranged existing knowledge, have spent long periods of their lives in solitude. Hence leadership does not only apply in social situations, but also occurs in more solitary situations such as developing new techniques in the arts, creating new philosophies, writing profound books and making scientific breakthroughs.

Unfortunately, many people suffer from BPS - Blank Page Syndrome. Let's face it: starting to write is scary. Seeing the cursor blinking at you on that bright white screen, realizing that you now have to come up with three or ten or twenty pages of text all on your own - it's enough to give anyone a major case of writer's block!

Life, raw life, the kind we lead every day, whether it leads us into the past or the future, has the curious property of not seeming real enough. We have a need, however illusive, for a life that is more real than life. It lies in the imagination. Fiction would seem to be the way it is processed into reality. If this were not so we should have little excuse for art. Life, raw life, would be more than satisfactory in itself. But it seems to be the nature of man to transform—himself, if possible, and then the world around him—and the technique of this transformation is what we call art.

Plotting is an organic, and wildly inefficient process of trial and error.

Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.

less choice is better.

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.

Inside" Children Inside each of us are the children we were at each developmental stage. With regard to our creative dreams, these inside children can prevent us from living them by "acting out" in order to try to get our attention. Your inner 5-year-old is not going to patiently wait as you learn intricate metalworking techniques or study impressionist painting. Yet, your inner 10-year-old may be perfectly suited to learn and observe new skills. What's really needed is parenting of these inside children so that we bring them to age-appropriate activities.

The novelist is like the conductor of an orchestra, his back to the audience, his face invisible, summoning the experience of music for the people he cannot see. The writer as conductor also gets to compose the music and play all of the instruments, a task less formidable than it seems.

I don’t want to re-write the same old book with the same tired techniques. I’d rather bring something new to the table that’s true to me and that people will have a genuine reaction to. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?

In my own opinion, the average American's cultural shortcomings can be likened to those of the educated barbarians of ancient Rome. These were barbarians who learned to speak--and often to read and write--Latin. They acquired Roman habits of dress and deportment. Many of them handily mastered Roman commercial, engineering and military techniques--but they remained barbarians nonetheless. They failed to develop any understanding, appreciation or love for the art and culture of the great civilization around them.

Having a meaningful and well-defined task beats willpower every time. Not having willpower, but not having to use willpower indicates that you set yourself up for success. This is where the organisation of writing and note-taking comes into play.

While extroverts tend to attain leadership in public domains, introverts tend to attain leadership in theoretical and aesthetic fields. Outstanding introverted leaders, such as Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Patrick White and Arthur Boyd, who have created either new fields of thought or rearranged existing knowledge, have spent long periods of their lives in solitude. Hence leadership does not only apply in social situations, but also occurs in more solitary situations such as developing new techniques in the arts, creating new philosophies, writing profound books and making scientific breakthroughs.

So, reader, should you ever find yourself writing about the world, take care not to nibble at the many tempting symbols she sets squarely in your path, or you'll be baited into saying things you don't really mean, and offending the people you want most to entertain. Develop, if you can, the technique of the pall bearers and myself: smile, to be sure -- for fucking dogs are truly funny -- but walk on and say nothing, as though you hadn't noticed.

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.)

Jonathan Safran Foer’s 10 Rules for Writing: 1.Tragedies make great literature; unfathomable catastrophes (the Holocaust, 9/11) are even better – try to construct your books around them for added gravitas but, since those big issues are such bummers, make sure you do it in a way that still focuses on a quirky central character that’s somewhat like Jonathan Safran Foer. 2. You can also name your character Jonathan Safran Foer. 3. If you’re writing a non-fiction book you should still make sure that it has a strong, deep, wise, and relatable central character – someone like Jonathan Safran Foer. 4. If you reach a point in your book where you’re not sure what to do, or how to approach a certain scene, or what the hell you’re doing, just throw in a picture, or a photo, or scribbles, or blank pages, or some illegible text, or maybe even a flipbook. Don’t worry if these things don’t mean anything, that’s what postmodernism is all about. If you’re not sure what to put in, you can’t go wrong with a nice photograph of Jonathan Safran Foer. 5. If you come up with a pun, metaphor, or phrase that you think is really clever and original, don’t just use it once and throw it away, sprinkle it liberally throughout the text. One particularly good phrase that comes to mind is “Jonathan Safran Foer.” 6. Don’t worry if you seem to be saying the same thing over and over again, repetition makes the work stronger, repetition is good, it drives the point home. The more you repeat a phrase or an idea, the better it gets. You should not be afraid of repeating ideas or phrases. One particularly good phrase that comes to mind is “Jonathan Safran Foer.” 7. Other writers are not your enemies, they are your friends, so you should feel free to borrow some of their ideas, words, techniques, and symbols, and use them completely out of context. They won’t mind, they’re your friends, just like my good friend Paul Auster, with whom I am very good friends. Just make sure you don’t steal anything from Jonathan Safran Foer, it wouldn’t be nice, he is your friend. 8. Make sure you have exactly three plots in your novel, any more and it gets confusing, any less and it’s not postmodern. At least one of those plots should be in a different timeline. It often helps if you name these three plots, I often use “Jonathan,” “Safran,” and “Foer.” 9. Don’t be afraid to make bold statements in you writing, there should always be a strong lesson to be learned, such as “don’t eat animals,” or “the Holocaust was bad,” or “9/11 was really really sad,” or “the world would be a better place if everyone was just a little bit more like Jonathan Safran Foer.” 10. In the end, don’t worry if you’re unsuccessful as a writer, it probably wasn’t meant to be. Not all of us are chosen to become writers. Not all of us can be Jonathan Safran Foer.

For me, where genre ends and literature begins doesn’t matter. What matters is whether a given novel hits me with high impact. If it does, it probably is fulfilling the purpose of fiction. It has drawn me into a story world, held me captive, taken me on a journey with characters like none I’ve ever met, revealed truths I’ve somehow always known and insights that rock my brain. It’s filled me with awe, which is to say it’s made me see the familiar in a wholly new way and made the unfamiliar a foundational part of me. It both entertains and matters. It both captures our age and becomes timelessly great. It does all that with the sturdy tools of story and the flair of narrative art.

The museums in children’s minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror—to protect the children from eternal grief. For my own part, though: It would have been catastrophe if I had forgotten my sister at once. I had never told her so, but she was the person I had always written for. She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved. She was the secret of my technique. Any creation which has any wholeness and harmoniousness, I suspect, was made by an artist or inventor with an audience of one in mind. Yes, and she was nice enough, or Nature was nice enough, to allow me to feel her presence for a number of years after she died—to let me go on writing for her. But then she began to fade away, perhaps because she had more important business elsewhere.

Only now, years after having read though the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Scott, Poe, Balzac did he realise that even the most prolific writer created only one novel; throw away the individual bindings and the whole of each man's writing constituted one book: the true and complete portrait of himself. An artist had one thing to say, and one only; he might flail about, seek new techniques, forms, colour combinations, subjects, but intrinsically he would always paint the same canvas, write the same book.

Writing plays such a central role in learning, studying and research that it is surprising how little we think about it. If writing is discussed, the focus lies almost always on the few exceptional moments where we write a lengthy piece, a book, an article or, as students, the essays and theses we have to hand in.

I still suspect that most people start out with some kind of ability to tell a story but that it gets lost along the way. Of course, the ability to create life with words is essentially a gift. If you have it in the first place, you can develop it; if you don't have it, you might as well forget it. But I have found that people who don't have it are frequently the ones hell-bent on writing stories. I'm sure anyway that they are the ones who write the books and the magazine articles on how-to-write-short-stories. I have a friend who is taking a correspondence course in this subject, and she has passed a few of the chapter headings on to me—such as, "The Story Formula for Writers," "How to Create Characters," "Let's Plot!" This form of corruption is costing her twenty-seven dollars.

Jubal shrugged. "Abstract design is all right-for wall paper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturbation. . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce- render emotional-his audience, each time. These ladies who won't deign to do that- and perhaps can't- of course lost the public. If they hadn't lobbied for endless subsidies, they would have starved or been forced to go to work long ago. Because the ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for 'art' that leaves him unmoved- if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes or such." "You know, Jubal, I've always wondered why i didn't give a hoot for paintings or statues- but I thought it was something missing in me, like color blindness." "Mmm, one does have to learn to look at art, just as you must know French to read a story printed in French. But in general terms it's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code like Pepys and his diary. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn. . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything- obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence. Ben, would you call me an artists?” “Huh? Well, I’ve never thought about it. You write a pretty good stick.” “Thank you. ‘Artist’ is a word I avoid for the same reasons I hate to be called ‘Doctor.’ But I am an artist, albeit a minor one. Admittedly most of my stuff is fit to read only once… and not even once for a busy person who already knows the little I have to say. But I am an honest artist, because what I write is consciously intended to reach the customer… reach him and affect him, if possible with pity and terror… or, if not, at least to divert the tedium of his hours with a chuckle or an odd idea. But I am never trying to hide it from him in a private language, nor am I seeking the praise of other writers for ‘technique’ or other balderdash. I want the praise of the cash customer, given in cash because I’ve reached him- or I don’t want anything. Support for the arts- merde! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore! Damn it, you punched one of my buttons. Let me fill your glass and you tell me what is on your mind.

School is different. Pupils are usually not encouraged to follow their own learning paths, question and discuss everything the teacher is teaching and move on to another topic if something does not promise to generate interesting insight. The teacher is there for the pupils to learn. But, as Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin and brother to the great explorer Alexander von Humboldt, put it, the professor is not there for the student and the student not for the professor. Both are only there for the truth. And truth is always a public matter.

I had not then acquired the technique that I flatter myself now enables me to deal competently with the works of modern artist. If this were the place I could write a very neat little guide to enable the amateur of pictures to deal to the satisfaction of their painters with the most diverse manifestations of the creative instinct. There is the intense ‘By God!’ that acknowledges the power of the ruthless realist, the ‘It’s so awfully sincere’ that covers your embarrassment when you are shown the coloured photograph of an alderman’s widow, the low whistle that exhibits your admiration for the post-impressionist, the ‘Terribly amusing’ that expresses what you feel about the cubist, the ‘Oh!’ of one who is overcome, the ‘Ah!’ of him whose breath is taken away.

A writer sets out to write science fiction but isn’t familiar with the genre, hasn’t read what’s been written. This is a fairly common situation, because science fiction is known to sell well but, as a subliterary genre, is not supposed to be worth study—what’s to learn? It doesn’t occur to the novice that a genre is a genre because it has a field and focus of its own; its appropriate and particular tools, rules, and techniques for handling the material; its traditions; and its experienced, appreciative readers—that it is, in fact, a literature. Ignoring all this, our novice is just about to reinvent the wheel, the space ship, the space alien, and the mad scientist, with cries of innocent wonder. The cries will not be echoed by the readers. Readers familiar with that genre have met the space ship, the alien, and the mad scientist before. They know more about them than the writer does. In the same way, critics who set out to talk about a fantasy novel without having read any fantasy since they were eight, and in ignorance of the history and extensive theory of fantasy literature, will make fools of themselves because they don’t know how to read the book. They have no contextual information to tell them what its tradition is, where it’s coming from, what it’s trying to do, what it does. This was liberally proved when the first Harry Potter book came out and a lot of literary reviewers ran around shrieking about the incredible originality of the book. This originality was an artifact of the reviewers’ blank ignorance of its genres (children’s fantasy and the British boarding-school story), plus the fact that they hadn’t read a fantasy since they were eight. It was pitiful. It was like watching some TV gourmet chef eat a piece of buttered toast and squeal, “But this is delicious! Unheard of! Where has it been all my life?

Sometimes my sadness in reading is that I can’t stay. I fall away from the ability to receive. So that the life-long work of reading is the process of situating and elaborating within myself techniques that might guide or permit the lengthening duration and affective expansion of my receptive capacity. Within reading I desire lastingness in tandem with the falling away.   Writing proposes itself as a possible technique towards lastingness. My body becomes a desk. I lay the book on my chest; the notebook was waiting behind it, propped on the sloping lectern of the top of my thighs.

Seinfeld began his advice to Isaac with some common sense, noting “the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes,” and then explaining that the way to create better jokes was to write every day. Seinfeld continued by describing a specific technique he used to help maintain this discipline. He keeps a calendar on his wall. Every day that he writes jokes he crosses out the date on the calendar with a big red X. “After a few days you’ll have a chain,” Seinfeld said. “Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.” This chain method (as some now call it) soon became a hit among writers and fitness enthusiasts—communities that thrive on the ability to do hard things consistently.

Sheila taught me a survival technique for getting through seemingly intolerable situations-boring lunches, stern lectures on attitude or time management, those necessary breakup conversations, and the like: maintaining eye contact, keep your face inscrutable and masklike, with your faintest hint at a Gioconda smile. Keep this up as long as you possibly can, and just as you feel you are about to crack and take a letter opener and plunge it into someone's neck, fold your hands in your lap, one nestled inside the other, like those of a supplicant in a priory. Now, with the index finger of your inner hand, write on the palm of the other, very discreetly and undetectably, "I hate you. I hate you. I hate you..." over and over again as you pretend to listen. You will find that this brings a spontaneous look of interest and pleased engagement to your countenance. Continue and repeat as necessary.

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book. The reason for that is that in adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult writers who deal in straightforward stories find themselves sidelined into a genre such as crime or science fiction, where no one expects literary craftsmanship. But stories are vital. Stories never fail us because, as Isaac Bashevis Singer says, "events never grow stale." There's more wisdom in a story than in volumes of philosophy. And by a story I mean not only Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk but also the great novels of the nineteenth century, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Bleak House and many others: novels where the story is at the center of the writer's attention, where the plot actually matters. The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They're embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do. But what characterizes the best of children's authors is that they're not embarrassed to tell stories. They know how important stories are, and they know, too, that if you start telling a story you've got to carry on till you get to the end. And you can't provide two ends, either, and invite the reader to choose between them. Or as in a highly praised recent adult novel I'm about to stop reading, three different beginnings. In a book for children you can't put the plot on hold while you cut artistic capers for the amusement of your sophisticated readers, because, thank God, your readers are not sophisticated. They've got more important things in mind than your dazzling skill with wordplay. They want to know what happens next.

Let me try to explain to you, what to my taste is characteristic for all intelligent thinking. It is, that one is willing to study in depth an aspect of one's subject matter in isolation for the sake of its own consistency, all the time knowing that one is occupying oneself only with one of the aspects. We know that a program must be correct and we can study it from that viewpoint only; we also know that it should be efficient and we can study its efficiency on another day, so to speak. In another mood we may ask ourselves whether, and if so: why, the program is desirable. But nothing is gained—on the contrary!—by tackling these various aspects simultaneously. It is what I sometimes have called "the separation of concerns", which, even if not perfectly possible, is yet the only available technique for effective ordering of one's thoughts, that I know of. This is what I mean by "focusing one's attention upon some aspect": it does not mean ignoring the other aspects, it is just doing justice to the fact that from this aspect's point of view, the other is irrelevant. It is being one- and multiple-track minded simultaneously.

What is fantasy? On one level, of course, it is a game: a pure pretense with no ulterior motive whatever. It is one child saying to another child, “Let’s be dragons,” and then they’re dragons for an hour or two. It is escapism of the most admirable kind—the game played for the game’s sake. On another level, it is still a game, but a game played for very high stakes. Seen thus, as art, not spontaneous play, its affinity is not with daydream, but with dream. It is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. It is not antirational but pararational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary, not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes, which, Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. And their guides, the writers of fantasy, should take their responsibilities seriously.

Anger is an energy. It really bloody is. It’s possibly the most powerful one-liner I’ve ever come up with. When I was writing the Public Image Ltd song ‘Rise’, I didn’t quite realize the emotional impact that it would have on me, or anyone who’s ever heard it since. I wrote it in an almost throwaway fashion, off the top of my head, pretty much when I was about to sing the whole song for the first time, at my then new home in Los Angeles. It’s a tough, spontaneous idea. ‘Rise’ was looking at the context of South Africa under apartheid. I’d be watching these horrendous news reports on CNN, and so lines like ‘They put a hotwire to my head, because of the things I did and said’, are a reference to the torture techniques that the apartheid government was using out there. Insufferable. You’d see these reports on TV and in the papers, and feel that this was a reality that simply couldn’t be changed. So, in the context of ‘Rise’, ‘Anger is an energy’ was an open statement, saying, ‘Don’t view anger negatively, don’t deny it – use it to be creative.’ I combined that with another refrain, ‘May the road rise with you’. When I was growing up, that was a phrase my mum and dad – and half the surrounding neighbourhood, who happened to be Irish also – used to say. ‘May the road rise, and your enemies always be behind you!’ So it’s saying, ‘There’s always hope’, and that you don’t always have to resort to violence to resolve an issue. Anger doesn’t necessarily equate directly to violence. Violence very rarely resolves anything. In South Africa, they eventually found a relatively peaceful way out. Using that supposedly negative energy called anger, it can take just one positive move to change things for the better. When I came to record the song properly, the producer and I were arguing all the time, as we always tend to do, but sometimes the arguing actually helps; it feeds in. When it was released in early 1986, ‘Rise’ then became a total anthem, in a period when the press were saying that I was finished, and there was nowhere left for me to go. Well, there was, and I went there. Anger is an energy. Unstoppable.

There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art. The trick is to keep a secret. Or many secrets, even. In Lee Child’s books, Jack Reacher always has a big mystery to crack, but there are a series of smaller mysteries in the meantime, too, a new one appearing as soon as the last is resolved. J. K. Rowling is another master of this technique — Who gave Harry that Firebolt? How is Rita Skeeter getting her info? The art, meanwhile, the thing that makes “Pride and Prejudice” so superbly suspenseful, more suspenseful than the slickest spy novel, is to write stories in which characters must make decisions. “Breaking Bad” kept a few secrets from its audience, but for the most part it was fantastically adept at forcing Walter and Jesse into choice, into action. The same is true of “Freedom,” or “My Brilliant Friend,” or “Anna Karenina,” all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy.

When The Matrix debuted in 1999, it was a huge box-office success. It was also well received by critics, most of whom focused on one of two qualities—the technological (it mainstreamed the digital technique of three-dimensional “bullet time,” where the on-screen action would freeze while the camera continued to revolve around the participants) or the philosophical (it served as a trippy entry point for the notion that we already live in a simulated world, directly quoting philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 reality-rejecting book Simulacra and Simulation). If you talk about The Matrix right now, these are still the two things you likely discuss. But what will still be interesting about this film once the technology becomes ancient and the philosophy becomes standard? I suspect it might be this: The Matrix was written and directed by “the Wachowski siblings.” In 1999, this designation meant two brothers; as I write today, it means two sisters. In the years following the release of The Matrix, the older Wachowski (Larry, now Lana) completed her transition from male to female. The younger Wachowski (Andy, now Lilly) publicly announced her transition in the spring of 2016. These events occurred during a period when the social view of transgender issues radically evolved, more rapidly than any other component of modern society. In 1999, it was almost impossible to find any example of a trans person within any realm of popular culture; by 2014, a TV series devoted exclusively to the notion won the Golden Globe for Best Television Series. In the fifteen-year window from 1999 to 2014, no aspect of interpersonal civilization changed more, to the point where Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner attracted more Twitter followers than the president (and the importance of this shift will amplify as the decades pass—soon, the notion of a transgender US president will not seem remotely implausible). So think how this might alter the memory of The Matrix: In some protracted reality, film historians will reinvestigate an extremely commercial action movie made by people who (unbeknownst to the audience) would eventually transition from male to female. Suddenly, the symbolic meaning of a universe with two worlds—one false and constructed, the other genuine and hidden—takes on an entirely new meaning. The idea of a character choosing between swallowing a blue pill that allows him to remain a false placeholder and a red pill that forces him to confront who he truly is becomes a much different metaphor. Considered from this speculative vantage point, The Matrix may seem like a breakthrough of a far different kind. It would feel more reflective than entertaining, which is precisely why certain things get remembered while certain others get lost.

All writers are demonic dreamers. Writing is an act of sharing experiences and offering of an individualistic perspective of our private attitudes pertaining to whatever topics of thought intrigues the author. Writing is a twitchy art, which attempts to employ linguist building blocks handed-down from past generations. Writers’ word choices form a structure of conjoined sentences when overlaid with the lingua of modern culture. Writers attempt to emulate in concrete form the synesthesia of our personal pottage steeped in our most vivid feelings. Writing a personal essay calls for us to sort out a jungle of lucid observations and express in a tangible technique our unique interpretation of coherent observations interlaced with that effusive cascade of yearning, the universal spice of unfilled desire, which turmoil of existential angst swamps us.

One cannot say that a major poet writes better poems than a minor; on the contrary the chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor.... To qualify as major, a poet, it seems to me, must satisfy about three and a half of the following five conditions. 1. He must write a lot. 2. His poems must show a wide range in subject matter and treatment. 3. He must exhibit an unmistakable originality of vision and style. 4. He must be a master of verse technique. 5. In the case of all poets we distinguish between their juvenilia and their mature work, but [the major poet's] process of maturing continues until he dies....

Strive to do small things well. Be a doer and a self-starter—aggressiveness and initiative are two most admired qualities in a leader—but you must also put your feet up and think. Strive for self-improvement through constant self-evaluation. Never be satisfied. Ask of any project, How can it be done better? Don’t overinspect or oversupervise. Allow your leaders to make mistakes in training, so they can profit from the errors and not make them in combat. Keep the troops informed; telling them “what, how, and why” builds their confidence. The harder the training, the more troops will brag. Enthusiasm, fairness, and moral and physical courage—four of the most important aspects of leadership. Showmanship—a vital technique of leadership. The ability to speak and write well—two essential tools of leadership. There is a salient difference between profanity and obscenity; while a leader employs profanity (tempered with discretion), he never uses obscenities. Have consideration for others. Yelling detracts from your dignity; take men aside to counsel them. Understand and use judgment; know when to stop fighting for something you believe is right. Discuss and argue your point of view until a decision is made, and then support the decision wholeheartedly. Stay ahead of your boss.

The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak. There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead. If we compare the chief trumpeter of the new era (Bacon) with Marlowe's Faustus, the similarity is striking.

In a mass society where obtaining credit is as easy as it is, there’s probably no way to efficiently collect on delinquent accounts by writing real affidavits, filing legitimate, error-free lawsuits, and serving legitimate summonses in each and every individual case. Without the shortcuts, it doesn’t work. So techniques like robo-signing and sewer service are essential to the profitability of the business. Plenty of people—consumers and merchants both—are probably glad that so much credit is available, but they don’t realize that systematic fraud is part of what makes it available. Legally, there’s absolutely no difference between a woman on welfare who falsely declares that her boyfriend no longer lives in the home and a bank that uses a robo-signer to cook up a document swearing that he has kept regular records of your credit card account. But morally and politically, they’re worlds apart. When the state brings a fraud case against a welfare mom, it brings it with disgust, with rage, because in addition to committing the legal crime, she’s committed the political crime of being needy and an eyesore. Banks commit the legal crime of fraud wholesale; they do so out in the open, have entire departments committed to it, and have employees who’ve spent years literally doing nothing but commit, over and over again, the same legal crime that some welfare mothers go to jail for doing once. But they’re not charged, because there’s no political crime. The system is not disgusted by the organized, mechanized search for profit. It’s more like it’s impressed by it.

I'll call any length of fiction a story, whether it be a novel or a shorter piece, and I'll call anything a story in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative. I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing. When they realize that they aren't writing stories, they decide that the remedy for this is to learn something that they refer to as "the technique of the short story" or "the technique of the novel." Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.

Parent and Teacher Actions: 1. Ask children what their role models would do. Children feel free to take initiative when they look at problems through the eyes of originals. Ask children what they would like to improve in their family or school. Then have them identify a real person or fictional character they admire for being unusually creative and inventive. What would that person do in this situation? 2. Link good behaviors to moral character. Many parents and teachers praise helpful actions, but children are more generous when they’re commended for being helpful people—it becomes part of their identity. If you see a child do something good, try saying, “You’re a good person because you ___.” Children are also more ethical when they’re asked to be moral people—they want to earn the identity. If you want a child to share a toy, instead of asking, “Will you share?” ask, “Will you be a sharer?” 3. Explain how bad behaviors have consequences for others. When children misbehave, help them see how their actions hurt other people. “How do you think this made her feel?” As they consider the negative impact on others, children begin to feel empathy and guilt, which strengthens their motivation to right the wrong—and to avoid the action in the future. 4. Emphasize values over rules. Rules set limits that teach children to adopt a fixed view of the world. Values encourage children to internalize principles for themselves. When you talk about standards, like the parents of the Holocaust rescuers, describe why certain ideals matter to you and ask children why they’re important. 5. Create novel niches for children to pursue. Just as laterborns sought out more original niches when conventional ones were closed to them, there are ways to help children carve out niches. One of my favorite techniques is the Jigsaw Classroom: bring students together for a group project, and assign each of them a unique part. For example, when writing a book report on Eleanor Roosevelt’s life, one student worked on her childhood, another on her teenage years, and a third on her role in the women’s movement. Research shows that this reduces prejudice—children learn to value each other’s distinctive strengths. It can also give them the space to consider original ideas instead of falling victim to groupthink. To further enhance the opportunity for novel thinking, ask children to consider a different frame of reference. How would Roosevelt’s childhood have been different if she grew up in China? What battles would she have chosen to fight there?

Analytic philosophy, that is to say, can very occasionally produce practically conclusive results of a negative kind. It can show in a few cases that just too much incoherence and inconsistency is involved in some position for any reasonable person to continue to hold it. But it can never establish the rational acceptability of any particular position in cases where each of the alternative rival positions available has sufficient range and scope and the adherents of each are willing to pay the price necessary to secure coherence and consistency. Hence the peculiar flavor of so much contemporary analytic writing—by writers less philosophically self-aware than Rorty or Lewis—in which passages of argument in which the most sophisticated logical and semantic techniques available are deployed in order to secure maximal rigor alternate with passages which seem to do no more than cobble together a set of loosely related arbitrary preferences; contemporary analytic philosophy exhibits a strange partnership between an idiom deeply indebted to Frege and Carnap and one deriving from the more simple-minded forms of existentialism

Gratitude practices as they’re generally presented in pop culture—usually some form of grateful-for-what-you-have exercise, like “Every day, write a list of ten things you’re grateful for”—don’t cut it, empirically speaking. When Emily tried this, it always made her feel worse because it just reminded her of how many people don’t have those things, which made her feel helpless and inadequate. Then she read the research herself and followed the instructions of the evidence-based interventions…and it worked like a charm. There are two techniques that really get the job done, and neither involves gratitude-for-what-you-have. The key is practicing gratitude-for-who-you-have and gratitude-for-how-things-happen. A Short-Term Quick-Fix Gratitude Boost is gratitude-for-who-you-have. Mr. Rogers, accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award, asked everyone in the audience to take ten seconds to remember some of the people who have “helped you love the good that grows within you, some of those people who have loved us and wanted what was best for us, […] those who have encouraged us to become who we are.” That’s how to gratitude-for-who-you-have.

[ Dr. Lois Jolyon West was cleared at Top Secret for his work on MKULTRA. ] Dr. Michael Persinger [235], another FSMF Board Member, is the author of a paper entitled “Elicitation of 'Childhood Memories' in Hypnosis-Like Settings Is Associated With Complex Partial Epileptic-Like Signs For Women But Not for Men: the False Memory Syndrome.” In the paper Perceptual and Motor Skills,In the paper, Dr. Persinger writes: On the day of the experiment each subject (not more than two were tested per day) was asked to sit quietly in an acoustic chamber and was told that the procedure was an experiment in relaxation. The subject wore goggles and a modified motorcycle helmet through which 10-milligauss (1 microTesla) magnetic fields were applied through the temporal plane. Except for a weak red (photographic developing) light, the room was dark. Dr. Persinger's research on the ability of magnetic fields to facilitate the creation of false memories and altered states of consciousness is apparently funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency through the project cryptonym SLEEPING BEAUTY. Freedom of Information Act requests concerning SLEEPING BEAUTY with a number of different intelligence agencies including the CIA and DEA has yielded denial that such a program exists. Certainly, such work would be of direct interest to BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA and other non-lethal weapons programs. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. Persinger as an Interview Source in his book on remote viewing operations conducted under Stargate, Grill Flame and other cryptonyms at Fort Meade and on contract to the Stanford Research Institute. Schnabel states (p. 220) that, “As one of the Pentagon's top scientists, Vorona was privy to some of the strangest, most secret research projects ever conceived. Grill Flame was just one. Another was code-named Sleeping Beauty; it was a Defense Department study of remote microwave mind-influencing techniques ... [...] It appears from Schnabel's well-documented investigations that Sleeping Beauty is a real, but still classified mind control program. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. West as an Interview Source and says that West was a, “Member of medical oversight board for Science Applications International Corp. remote-viewing research in early 1990s.

Expanding further on his own observations of Prince’s writing style(s) during the course of the album’s recording, fellow Paisley Park engineer Eddie Miller, who engineered the recording of ‘Electric Chair’ among other Prince recordings during the Batman era, recalled that “he would write all sorts of ways. I have to admit that I listened to some of his cassette demos that he would sometimes bring into the studio to reference (as I remember, he would hold the cassette player up to his ear, so you couldn’t really hear it.). They were fascinating. His cassette demo technique was extremely crude but ingenious—it’s like something you’d do if you had no access to any equipment. He’d use two cheap cassette recorders. If he wanted to hear drums, he’d record a human beat box rhythm for the length of the song—and most likely, he’d have the form of the song in his head while he was recording this. By the way, it was the same in the studio when he’d do his one man band approach to recording a song. He’d know the song in his head, and start out recording the drums for the song (it would essentially become the ‘click track’—the way a click track should be). Back to the cassette demo—he’d then play his beat box groove over the speaker on the cassette recorder and sing the bass line while recording all this onto the second cassette machine. He’d build up a rhythm track this way, and then add vocals. And there’s your demo.

HOW TO DRIVE A WRITER CRAZY “1. When he starts to outline a story, immediately give him several stories just like it to read and tell him three other plots. This makes his own story and his feeling for it vanish in a cloud of disrelated facts. "2. When he outlines a character, read excerpts from stories about such characters, saying that this will clarify the writer's ideas. As this causes him to lose touch with the identity he felt in his character by robbing him of individuality, he is certain to back away from ever touching such a character. "3. Whenever the writer proposes a story, always mention that his rate, being higher than other rates of writers in the book, puts up a bar to his stories. "4. When a rumor has stated that a writer is a fast producer, invariably confront him with the fact with great disapproval, as it is, of course, unnatural for one human being to think faster than another. "5. Always correlate production and rate, saying that it is necessary for the writer to do better stories than the average for him to get any consideration whatever. "6. It is a good thing to mention any error in a story bought, especially when that error is to be editorially corrected, as this makes the writer feel that he is being criticized behind his back and he wonders just how many other things are wrong. "7. Never fail to warn a writer not to be mechanical, as this automatically suggests to him that his stories are mechanical and, as he considers this a crime, wonders how much of his technique shows through and instantly goes to much trouble to bury mechanics very deep—which will result in laying the mechanics bare to the eye. "8. Never fail to mention and then discuss budget problems with a writer, as he is very interested. "9. By showing his vast knowledge of a field, an editor can almost always frighten a writer into mental paralysis, especially on subjects where nothing is known anyway. "10. Always tell a writer plot tricks, as they are not his business.

Yoga has been superficially misunderstood by certain Western writers, but its critics have never been its practitioners. Among many thoughtful tributes to yoga may be mentioned one by Dr. C. G. Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist. “When a religious method recommends itself as ‘scientific,’ it can be certain of its public in the West. Yoga fulfills this expectation,” Dr. Jung writes (7). “Quite apart from the charm of the new, and the fascination of the half-understood, there is good cause for Yoga to have many adherents. It offers the possibility of controllable experience, and thus satisfies the scientific need of ‘facts,’ and besides this, by reason of its breadth and depth, its venerable age, its doctrine and method, which include every phase of life, it promises undreamed-of possibilities. “Every religious or philosophical practice means a psychological discipline, that is, a method of mental hygiene. The manifold, purely bodily procedures of Yoga (8) also mean a physiological hygiene which is superior to ordinary gymnastics and breathing exercises, inasmuch as it is not merely mechanistic and scientific, but also philosophical; in its training of the parts of the body, it unites them with the whole of the spirit, as is quite clear, for instance, in the Pranayama exercises where Prana is both the breath and the universal dynamics of the cosmos. “When the thing which the individual is doing is also a cosmic event, the effect experienced in the body (the innervation), unites with the emotion of the spirit (the universal idea), and out of this there develops a lively unity which no technique, however scientific, can produce. Yoga practice is unthinkable, and would also be ineffectual, without the concepts on which Yoga is based. It combines the bodily and the spiritual with each other in an extraordinarily complete way. “In the East, where these ideas and practices have developed, and where for several thousand years an unbroken tradition has created the necessary spiritual foundations, Yoga is, as I can readily believe, the perfect and appropriate method of fusing body and mind together so that they form a unity which is scarcely to be questioned. This unity creates a psychological disposition which makes possible intuitions that transcend consciousness.” The Western day is indeed nearing when the inner science of self- control will be found as necessary as the outer conquest of nature. This new Atomic Age will see men’s minds sobered and broadened by the now scientifically indisputable truth that matter is in reality a concentrate of energy. Finer forces of the human mind can and must liberate energies greater than those within stones and metals, lest the material atomic giant, newly unleashed, turn on the world in mindless destruction (9).

If I know the classical psychological theories well enough to pass my comps and can reformulate them in ways that can impress peer reviewers from the most prestigious journals, but have not the practical wisdom of love, I am only an intrusive muzak soothing the ego while missing the heart. And if I can read tea leaves, throw the bones and manipulate spirits so as to understand the mysteries of the universe and forecast the future with scientific precision, and if I have achieved a renaissance education in both the exoteric and esoteric sciences that would rival Faust and know the equation to convert the mass of mountains into psychic energy and back again, but have not love, I do not even exist. If I gain freedom from all my attachments and maintain constant alpha waves in my consciousness, showing perfect equanimity in all situations, ignoring every personal need and compulsively martyring myself for the glory of God, but this is not done freely from love, I have accomplished nothing. Love is great-hearted and unselfish; love is not emotionally reactive, it does not seek to draw attention to itself. Love does not accuse or compare. It does not seek to serve itself at the expense of others. Love does not take pleasure in other peeople's sufferings, but rejoices when the truth is revealed and meaningful life restored. Love always bears reality as it is, extending mercy to all people in every situation. Love is faithful in all things, is constantly hopeful and meets whatever comes with immovable forbearance and steadfastness. Love never quits. By contrast, prophecies give way before the infinite possibilities of eternity, and inspiration is as fleeting as a breath. To the writing and reading of many books and learning more and more, there is no end, and yet whatever is known is never sufficient to live the Truth who is revealed to the world only in loving relationship. When I was a beginning therapist, I thought a lot and anxiously tried to fix people in order to lower my own anxiety. As I matured, my mind quieted and I stopped being so concerned with labels and techniques and began to realize that, in the mystery of attentive presence to others, the guest becomes the host in the presence of God. In the hospitality of genuine encounter with the other, we come face to face with the mystery of God who is between us as both the One offered One who offers. When all the theorizing and methodological squabbles have been addressed, there will still only be three things that are essential to pastoral counseling: faith, hope, and love. When we abide in these, we each remain as well, without comprehending how, for the source and raison d'etre of all is Love.