Lucky 13: Women Writers about Imagination.

“There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work.”
- Anaïs Nin (Henry and June)

“When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it.”
- Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)

"I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.”
- Alice Hoffman (Incantation)

“You will recognize your own path when you come upon it because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need.”
- Sara Teasdale

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”
- Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
- Sylvia Plath

“I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.”
- Ursula K. Le Guin (The Language of the Night)

“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."
- Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird)

“The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering. ”
- Brenda Ueland

“Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.”
- Ann Patchett (Truth and Beauty: A Friendship)

“Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master.”
- Agatha Christie (The Mysterious Affair at Styles)

“Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?”
- Jeanette Winterson (Sexing the Cherry)

“Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.”
- Patricia A. McKillip

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Photo 'Reach' by Keith Garner, available under a creative commons license. © 2011, Keith Garner.

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Lucky 13: Women Writers about Life.

"I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it."

- Maya Angelou

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."

- Anaïs Nin

"Perhaps we are in this world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars."

- Isabel Allende

"That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet."

- Emily Dickinson

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all."

- Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice."

- Jeanette Winterson

"What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question."

- Margaret Atwood

"Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining."

- Anne Lamott

"Ah! The terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear
ourselves! Until then we have not lived."

- Willa Cather

"So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough."

- Sylvia Plath

"I live in my own little world. But it's ok, they know me here."

- Lauren Myracle

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."

- Maya Angelou

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

- Mary Oliver

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Image : 'Women on holiday' by Sweet Chi. Available under a creative commons license. © 2011, Sweet Chi.

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P is for Poetry.

Years ago, around the time I started my MA in English and German Literature, I discovered my love for poetry.

Shortly before, at precisely the right time in my life, the film 'Dead Poets Society' had come out. It resonated on many levels, and not just because I had spent several years at boarding school myself.

I've always preferred poets whose works breathe Power, Passion and a Pure, raw intensity. There are so many: Pablo Neruda, Maya Angelou, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Adrienne Rich, P.B. Shelley, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, William Blake and many more.

In this post, I want to share one of my favourite poems, 'Acquainted with the Night' by Robert Frost, and - for old times' sake - the original trailer of Dead Poets Society.

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

- Robert Frost






Who are your favourite poets?

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Image: 'The Night at Azcuenaga' by Luis Argerich. Available under a creative commons license. © 2010, Luis Argerich.

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O is for Openings.

In writing, as in dating, a lot of attention is paid to opening lines.

Do opening lines really have the ability to draw a potential lover reader into a relationship novel? Maybe, but the rest of the person story will have to live up to those expectations.

Here are 13 opening lines (from novels) that managed to grab my attention and set off my imagination:


'The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.'
Jim Butcher (Blood Rites)


'Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.'
Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell)


'If I am out of my mind, it’s alright with me, thought Moses Herzog.'
Saul Bellow (Herzog)


'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.'
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)


'The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.'
William Gibson (Neuromancer)


'It was the day my grandmother exploded.'
Iain Banks (The Crow Road)


'It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.'
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)


'It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.'
Paul Auster (City of Glass)


'All children, except one, grow up.'
J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)


'It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.'
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)


'I looked at my notes and I didn't like them. I'd spent three days at U.S. Robots and might as well have spent them at home with the Encyclopedia Tellurica.'
Isaac Asimov (I, Robot)


'The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself.'
Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere)


'When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.'
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings)


What are your favourite opening lines?

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Image: 'beware of dog' by Justin Lincoln. Available under a creative commons license. © 2006, Justin Lincoln.

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Lucky 13: Women Writers about Writing.

Photo credit: Jim Kuhn

"Write what should not be forgotten."
-- Isabel Allende

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
-- Anaïs Nin

"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
-- Virginia Woolf

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
-- Maya Angelou

"Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for."
-- Alice Walker

"A word after a word after a word is power."
-- Margaret Atwood

"Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process."
-- Isabel Allende

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."
-- Joan Didion

"Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version."
-- Carolyn See

"There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know were they'll take you."
-- Beatrix Potter

"Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin

"If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy."
-- Nikki Giovanni

"Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot."
-- Doris Lessing

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Which of these is your favourite?

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Ode to My Kindle.

A few months ago, I got myself a Kindle.

It had been a difficult decision to make, because I really, really love books. I'm one of those people who washes her hands before touching them. I read them half-open to avoid wear and tear. I only lend copies to people I trust with my life books.

Part of what made this such a tough decision was the fact that I resented the idea of an electronic device replacing those paper wonders: hardcovers and paperbacks to store, display, fondle, re-read and share. I was afraid the practicality of technology would destroy the magic of reading.

Isn't it pretty?

Now that I've had my Kindle for a couple of months, I can only say I absolutely adore it - as well as its burgundy cover.

I've always been a passionate reader, but now I read even more. I carry it around wherever I go. I've discovered new authors, genres, styles of writing that I might never have come into contact with if it hadn't been for my e-reader.

I especially love the 'samples' option. At amazon.com, you can download a free sample of every novel that's available for your type (and nationality) of Kindle.

A sample usually consists of the first 1 to 3 chapters. It's become my new novel test: if, after reading the sample, I really want to know what happens next, and the style of writing doesn't turn me off, then I buy the book.

My Kindle has changed the way I read. The first page of a novel has always been important. It's what I look at in a bookstore, when I'm trying to decide whether or not I want to buy the book. The cover, the back flap and the first page.

With my Kindle, I don't really care about the cover. Most of the time I don't even see it. I look at reviews, download a sample, and read that. They have to draw me in. I also take that into account in my own writing.

What I find most interesting is that my Kindle doesn't replace books. I still buy paper copies of the ones I really like, the ones I want to lend out, the ones I want to display in my bookcases, stare at and thumb through. It's simply another medium, another way of reading.

This is also why Kindle books need to be cheaper than paper copies. They don't have the same value, so they shouldn't be priced the same. Sure, e-books have advantages: the sample option and the instant download as the most important ones.

But they're not books. You can't touch them, they're virtually invisible (compared to a book on a shelf), and they don't have the social charm of paper books: you can't share them and you don't interact about them with your friends, like you would with a book that's lying around in your living room or proudly perched on a shelf.

Do you own an e-reader? Would you consider getting one?
If you have one: what does it mean to you? Has it changed how you read?

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Poem: 'Fire and Ice' by Robert Frost

Photo credit: Olivier Gruenewald. Wild Wonders of Europe

Fire and Ice



Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Photo credit: Sven Zacek. Wild Wonders of Europe

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A Tale of Life, Death, Hunger and Love: Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games. A Review.

I have just resurfaced after burying myself in Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy. I had downloaded the first sample to my Kindle a while ago, but I needed to create a stretch of free, uninterrupted time to bite into it. And wow, did that bite turn into a binge!

Book 1 - cover

Up until half an hour ago, the outside world no longer existed. For a few days, I've co-inhabited the head of Katniss Everdeen, a mature sixteen-year-old, looking at a world that could have been ours. Or might become ours, one day. It's the tale of a resourceful girl in extraordinary circumstances, playing the cards she's been dealt and forced to face the consequences of her actions and decisions.

I don't want to go further into the story here; there are plenty of sources out there that do. What I do want to share is why I loved it so much.

First of all, Suzanne Collins is an amazing writer. These three were the first of her works I've ever read, but the Underland Chronicles are next on my list. It will be hard to meet my current expectations, but even if they're only half as good as the Hunger Games trilogy, it still won't be a waste of time to read those. All five of them.

Lately, with my own novel in the stage it's in, I've found it difficult to read other people's work without having my inner editor jump in, pointing out style, tricks, show vs. tell, great or poor dialogue and much more. I was starting to fear I had lost the ability to submerge myself in other writers' worlds, new stories and characters' lives.

Book 2 - cover

I couldn't have been further from the truth. The Hunger Games grabbed me from the first few pages and sucked me in, right until the end of Mockingjay. Along the way I laughed and cried, I ached and wondered, I felt empowered and enraged.

There are so many layers to these novels I can't even begin to describe. But of course I will try.

In these stories, Suzanne Collins captures human nature's paradoxes unlike any author I've read in a long time. She reveals our weaknesses and strengths, our courage and cowardice, the good and evil we are all capable of, especially when it affects the ones we love. Or hate.

These dilemmas emerge in a world where poverty, political corruption, brutality and violence reign. But we don't have to look far to find, interwoven, the importance of love, family, loyalty and hope.

Book 3: cover

I was very impressed with the wisdom the author shares and and the insights she provokes, without waving the belittling finger I so dislike (possibly because I'm not entirely unguilty of it myself.)

Suzanne Collins created a bunch of amazing characters here. I love how they come to life in her words, and how real they feel. Some of them I adore, others I despise, still others I pity. But hardly any don't affect me at all. And even in those cases, I feel that's exactly what the author intended. That might not be true, but the mere fact that she has me believe it, proves to me what an extraordinary writer and storyteller she is.

If you haven't read the novels yet, I can only recommend them. If you have, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

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Last Read Before Bed #1

Before bedtime, I wanted to share (a link to) one of my favourite poems by one of my favourite poets:

Rural Reflections by Adrienne Rich.

Enjoy, and: sweet dreams!

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Abandoned

I love this fellow blogger's collection of photographs of abandoned buildings.
Now there's inspiration if you ever needed any!

What amazing stories could have happened there, or are happening right as we speak? Who used to live, work or roam there and what were they doing?
Think of the great and weird parties you could host in places like this, providing you find a way to keep your drunk guests from dropping in the chair-pool! And wouldn't they make great settings for nightly roleplaying or storytelling sessions? Or game design?

Here's one photo to tease, and you can find many others at Abandoned - Pixcetera Blog or in Scallop Holden's 'Urbex' set on Flickr.

Credit: Scallop Holden.

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Haunted House and Gruesome Graveyard: Story Settings for Halloween.

I love this time of year, with its dark, windy nights, the colourful leaves piling up on the lawn and the fruits of our summer labour (which is basically limited to watching the fruit grow and ripen) stacked in the pantry.
I don't even mind the fuss about Halloween, but it probably helps that trick-or-treating is not very popular here.

Actually, I remember only one instance where one of the neighbour's kids came to ring our door bell on Hallow's Eve, possibly lured by the jack-o-lantern I'd put on our doorstep. It happened a few years ago, and it was an utterly embarrassing experience.
I try not to have any candy in the house, so I had to dig into my emergency stash of dark, bitter (Belgian) chocolate.
Who could have guessed that he wouldn't be happy? Either way, we haven't seen him since. I can only assume he survived.

What I love most about the end of October is that invisible blanket of deep but snug melancholy that seems to cover us all. Once more, we remember our loved ones, we start contemplating the year that's coming to an end, prepare ourselves for a cold (and possibly long) winter, and gather around the fire to express our hopes for what might come next. (There might have been some projection going on in this paragraph.)

It's also a great period for writing. I usually find my imagination running wild, especially late at night, trying to squeeze my novel or other stories into twists and turns I wouldn't think of during the lighter half of the year.

Today, in anticipation of the days to come, I wanted to share a few pictures I've taken over the past couple of years. It's an eclectic collection, but they're all places or buildings that could be the perfect setting for a ghost story, a scary novel or a real-life Halloween gathering with friends.

Now picture these locations on a dark October night. What gloomy adventures could be happening there, at this very moment?





Boscastle, Cornwall. The Museum of Witchcraft






Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire, England






Graveyard at Asthall, Oxfordshire, England






Details on one of the tombs.
Graveyard at Asthall, Oxfordshire, England






Church of Notre Dame at Epernay, France






Alchemist's Street, up in the castle. Prague, Czech Republic





Old castle steps. Prague, Czech Republic.






Graveyard, Crail, Scotland






House in Olot, Catalunya, Spain






Jewish cemetery in Worms, Germany







Temple of Mars, Rome, Italy

 
[Except for the jack-o-lanterns, all images in this article were made by the author]

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This post was inspired by the Halloween "Book or Treat" blog party for Unicef. You can find out more - and donate - after clicking on the image below:

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Writing, Persian rugs and the paradox of perfection.

For the past 1,5 years, I've been writing on my first full-size novel. I hadn't written 'for real' since I was a teenager, and it was a really big step to take.

But so far it's been one of the best decisions I've ever made, with lots of positive consequences that have rippled through to almost every other aspect of my life. It's helped me to stand still and concentrate on the world around me more often, and - through doing that - it's bringing me a lot closer to myself and what I really value.

The process of writing has caused quite a few confrontations with myself; some anticipated and some totally unexpected. Fortunately they all occur in a safe environment: my own fictional world, a realm where lots of things pop up, but where I'm in control. Most of the time. I can more or less decide which issues to deal with first and when, by carefully popping in and out of that world whenever I please.

One of the things I found out along the way, is that I'm more of a character-driven than a plot-driven writer.
That didn't surprise me, really. Whenever I read something, observe people or even when I watch TV, I always connect with the characters first. It doesn't matter that much whether I like them or not, as long as I feel I can grasp them, understand where they come from or suspect that they have a good reason for doing what they do.

That, indirectly, lead to me a very important realisation: I suddenly understood that I loved my own characters way too much.
Because of this, I'd been trying to chisel them to such perfection that, if I would run into them in the flesh, I'd really really dislike them.
Even though I'd been aware of this risk before I started writing, and tried to avoid it, I'd still fallen into the trap. And I knew that, until I'd go back to the drawing board to touch them up with a bunch of carefully constructed vices, blemishes and shortcomings, my characters could never be my friends.
Because, let's face it, in reality, perfection is not just boring, it's utterly detestable.

So why do so many of us - myself included - keep striving for it: in what we do, in how we look or even in wanting to become "our perfect self"?
Is perfection something we'd even want to attain?

While thinking this over, I remembered one of my history teachers once telling us about the 'Persian flaw', an imperfection that Persian rug makers deliberately wove into their carpets, because only God is perfect.
That idea has always resonated with me. Regardless of our individual concepts of 'God' or our relationship with Him/Her/They/It, the Persian flaw always makes me wonder: how pointless (and/or conceited?) is it to strive for the full 100% of anything?

Instead, wouldn't it make more sense to spend that extra energy on revaluing our unique, individual set of imperfections, and to see how we can turn them into a gift, for ourselves and/or others?

What are your Persian flaws that set you apart from everybody else, and what good can they do?

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