("Bird by Bird", "Maisie Dobbs")

[fiefoe]

I wish I had read Anne Lamott's book when I was younger and had more urge to write.

• One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.
• Prufrock’s crab
• It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in print; therefore you exist. Who knows what this urge is all about, to appear somewhere outside yourself, instead of feeling stuck inside your muddled but stroboscopic mind, peering out like a little undersea animal.
• “This is the great tragedy of California,” he wrote in the last paragraph, “for a life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death—the greatest leisure of all.”
• He could take major events or small episodes from daily life and shade or exaggerate things in such a way as to capture their shape and substance.
• Surprised by Joy, and how, looking inside himself, he found “a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds.”
• Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor.
• heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience;
• Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life.
• Remember that you own what happened to you.
• Phillip Lopate that someone once sent me, that goes: We who are your closest friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting, as a group, to devise ways to keep you in perpetual uncertainty frustration discontent and torture by neither loving you as much as you want nor cutting you adrift. Your analyst is in on it, plus your boyfriend and your ex-husband; and we have pledged to disappoint you as long as you need us. In announcing our association we realize we have placed in your hands a possible antidote against uncertainty... indeed against ourselves. But since our Thursday nights have brought us to a community of purpose rare in itself with you as the natural center, we feel hopeful you will continue to make unreasonable demands for affection if not as a consequence of your disastrous personality then for the good of the collective.
• 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 the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.
• Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it’s going to get. Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation, while writing needs to breathe and move.
• I think that something similar happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds—.. heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp.
• Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can’t—and, in fact, you’re not supposed to—know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing.
• the beauty of sheer effort.
• She said that every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own.
• Think of the basket of each character’s life: what holds the ectoplasm together—... The basket is an apt image because of all the holes. How aware is each character of how flimsy the basket really is?
• In general, though, there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.... That’s what plot is: what people will up and do in spite of everything that tells them they shouldn’t,
• “I feel like a lot of time my writing is like having about twenty boxes of Christmas decorations. But no tree. You’re going, Where do I put this? Then they go, Okay, you can have a tree, but we’ll blindfold you and you gotta cut it down with a spoon.” This is how I’ve arrived at my plots a number of times.
• She said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending.

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Jacqueline Winspear 's book would work better as a TV script maybe, given the heroine's improbable rise from chamber maid to college to nurse to private detective. The psychology bits are interesting but feels a bit hokey:
__ Maisie mimics her client's body language to intuit how they feel;
__ Her mentor admonishes her to keep her client on her feet, "like not letting paint dry when you are painting".
__ After talking to her clients about grim things, Maisie guide their minds to more hopeful things like painting a room or buying new Liberty prints.