When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain...

“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”

- A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (via triadic)

via jeffreyoverstreet.tumblr.com

Posted via email from Carissa's Scrapbook

Writing & uncertainty: “I’ve got a high tolerance for not knowing…I can sit and not know the heck out of a thing…” Heather Sellers

The Gift Of Face Blindness

Sellers says that, in a strange way, her inability to remember faces served her well as a child, because it taught her to cope with uncertainty. That ability is still useful to her as an adult and a writer.

"I think a lot of brilliant, talented writers have a hard time staying in that chair long enough to get through the inevitable chaos that comes when you sit down to make a piece of art, and I've got a high tolerance for not knowing," she says.

"I can sit and not know the heck out of a thing; I've been doing it my whole life," she says. "And I've trained myself, when I don't know, to not freak out, to just keep looking closer."

For years, Sellers looked for a cure, an end to her face blindness. But now, she says, she would never give it up. "It's allowed me to engage with the world in a meaningful way, and to talk to people with depth and authenticity. I don't know that I would have come to that without this disorder."

Face blindness "forces me to say right away the most vulnerable thing I could say to someone: I may not know you, but I want to."

via "Living With Face Blindness: Who Are You, Again?" : NPR.org

 

Posted via email from Carissa's Scrapbook

Writing & uncertainty: “I’ve got a high tolerance for not knowing…I can sit and not know the heck out of a thing…” Heather Sellers

The Gift Of Face Blindness

Sellers says that, in a strange way, her inability to remember faces served her well as a child, because it taught her to cope with uncertainty. That ability is still useful to her as an adult and a writer.

"I think a lot of brilliant, talented writers have a hard time staying in that chair long enough to get through the inevitable chaos that comes when you sit down to make a piece of art, and I've got a high tolerance for not knowing," she says.

"I can sit and not know the heck out of a thing; I've been doing it my whole life," she says. "And I've trained myself, when I don't know, to not freak out, to just keep looking closer."

For years, Sellers looked for a cure, an end to her face blindness. But now, she says, she would never give it up. "It's allowed me to engage with the world in a meaningful way, and to talk to people with depth and authenticity. I don't know that I would have come to that without this disorder."

Face blindness "forces me to say right away the most vulnerable thing I could say to someone: I may not know you, but I want to."

via "Living With Face Blindness: Who Are You, Again?" : NPR.org

Posted via email from Carissa Thorp's Posterous

"Every day includes much more non-being than being. This is always so. One walks, eats, sees things..." via @DanijShapiro

"Every day includes much more non-being than being. This is always so. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; washing; cooking dinner. When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger."

- Virginia Woolf

via danishapiro.com

Blog – Moments Of Being | Dani Shapiro

Posted via email from Carissa Thorp's Posterous

CS Lewis - the "clean sea breeze" of old books | No ideas in a vacuum - Joel J. Miller

Lewis himself helps us understand this in his famous (also 1944, by the way) introduction to St. Athanasius’ book, On The Incarnation. “Every age has its own outlook,” he writes. “It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.” Why? Because “All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it.” He could have easily used Orwell’s name there.

The problem is that every period ends up sharing “a great mass of common assumptions” and contemporaries (or locals, etc.) have trouble thinking beyond those assumptions. Lewis offers one help: “to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries [different contexts with different assumptions] blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books,” in his case then one by the great Alexandrian bishop Athanasius.

via joeljmiller.com

Posted via email from Carissa Thorp's Posterous

"Tired and tested: my New Novel begins | AL Kennedy | Books | guardian.co.uk"

A long project is, as you will realise, a massive and potentially ludicrous commitment of time and enthusiasm which could come apart in your hands at any moment, could promise wonders, cough twice and then turn into ashes and sand at the end of three years' preparation and one year's labour.

via guardian.co.uk

Posted via web from Carissa Thorp's Posterous

Stephanie Kallos » how to write your second novel or if you want to make God laugh, show Him your outline

Here then is the lesson learned from writing The Second Novel: the best writing comes not from the part of you that writes an outline. The best writing comes from the part of you that feels, grieves, fails, flails, yearns, despairs, flounders, and prays. The best writing comes from the place where you dream.

via stephaniekallos.com

Posted via web from Carissa Thorp's

CFS Quotes: For a While, Here, in This Moment

In my sickbed I am eons old, cubits wide, a glacial mass, a mile high, and biblically huge. Gulliver tethered by molecular weight and viral turpitude, I am adrift in the Sargasson Sea. I am unseen, huge as I am.

From the story “For a While, Here, in This Moment” in Down to a Sunless Sea by Mathias B. Freese.

Found at The Fix