You can have a very intense relationship with fictional characters because they are in your own head.
“
| — | JK Rowling (via symphonieducorbeaux) |
Out of curiosity…
How many of you are writers, as in novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, playwright, aspiring or published? What are you working on?
At college for fiction writing, and aspiring to be a novelist. I envy anyone who has mastered writing short stories.
You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.
“
| — | Ray Bradbury, Interview with The Paris Review |
Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn’t been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a… diving composure), hasn’t accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare, to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble.
“
| — | Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” |
