Tuesday 7/2/24
Other writers shouldn't influence you as a writer. Inspire--fine. That's different.
When you start dropping those names, I know what I need to know.
Don't get angry. It should all come from you. You are the wellspring.
Work this morning on "Finder of Views," which is at 10,500 words. "The Bird" is 433 words.
The value of a story is proportionate to the amount of life it contains. There's no way around this. The life can't be faked. It can't be artificially generated. There are no substitutes. The imbuing of it can't be taught to you. It can't be learned from anyone else. There isn't an experience or set of experiences that will then enable you to bring it off. It comes from inside of you and beyond you. It is you, even though none of these things are about you, or just you.
The number of differences between what I do and what the writers of the system do is infinite, but this is one of them. The life.
Maybe that’s how some people felt when they opened their basement freezer and saw a piece of their wedding cake preserved under several layers of rime fifteen years later. They’d be returned—restored—to the big day itself by an edge of the lightest blue frosting whose contours were so suggestive of a fixed moment standing in relief against the unfixed whole of existence that it was impossible for that person to believe they wouldn’t know this edge—their edge—from any other there’d ever been.
