Notes for 《Bird by bird》

书评会在这两周内写完，在此先贴出我的个人阅读笔记，仅供参考：

“
With the writer's quivalent of canvas and brush, i wrote a description of what I saw:"i walked to the lip of the water and let the foamy tongue of the rushing liquid lick my toes. A sand crab burrowed a hole a few inches from my foot and then disappeared into the damp sand..."


I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.


When they are working on their books or stories, their heads will spin with ideas and invention.

They will have days at the desk of frantic boredom, of angry hopelessness, of wanting to quit forever, and there will be days when it feels like they have caught and are riding a wave.


E. L. Doctorow once said that "writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."


Hope, as Chesterton said, is ithe power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.


A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft —— you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft —— you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.


I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.

Perfectionism is a mean, forzen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend.


One line of dialogue that rings true reveals character in a way that pages of description can't.


If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days —— listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off.


Life is not like formula fiction. The villain has a heart, and the hero has great flaws.


Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.


Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.


Jealousy is such a direct attack on whatever measure of confidence you've been able to muster. But if you continue to write, you are probably goiing to have to deal with it, because some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to happen for some of the most awful, angry undeserving writers you know —— people who are, in other words, not you.

You get all caught up in such fantasies because you feel, once again like the kid outside the candy-store window, and you believe that this friend, this friend whom you now hate, has all the candy. You believe that success is bringing this friend inordinate joy and serenity and security and that her days are easier.


One person reminded me of what Jean Rhys once wrote, that all of us writers are little rivers running into one lake, that what is good for one is good for all, that we all collectively share in one another's success and acclaim.


The word block suggests that you are constipated or stuck, when the truth is that you're empty. As I said in the last chapter, this emptiness can destroy some writers, as do the shame and frustration that go with it.


Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled bak and forth across the universe.


We seek instead all the wordly things —— possessions, money, looks, and power —— because we think they will bring us fulfillment. But this turns out to be a joke, because they are just props, and when we check out of this life, we have to give them all back to the great propmaster in the sky.


The writer's job is to see what's behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words —— not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues.


Your child and your work hold you hostage, suck you dry, ruin your sleep, mess with your head, treat you like dirt, and then you discover they've given you that gold nugget you were looking for all along.


It is one of the greatest feelings known to humans, the feeling of being the host, of hosting people, of being the person to whom they come for food and drink and company. This is what the writer has to offer.


We are wired as humans to be open to the world instead of encloses in a fortified, defensive mentality.


But then I remembered that whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware.


You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artist from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. ”