The Place For My Writers Notes

Original posting 23 July 2008

Just for fun, pick a number from one to five. Guess what, you have picked the following quote!

1. "Everybody has difficult years, but a lot of times the difficult years end up being the greatest years of your whole entire life, if you survive them." Brittany Murphy
2. "The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best -- and therefore never scrutinize or question." Stephen Jay Gould
3. "Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence." Robert Fripp
4. "We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them." Abigail Adams
5. "Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves." J. B. Priestley

Now go write about it. For example, if music is the wine that fills the cup of silence, then writing must be the wine that fills the cup of ??? Which cup does writing fill, anyway? And what strange grapes are pressed to make that wine, eh? Can't you imagine the muses, bare feet squishing those grapes in the press of time and place, all to squeeze out a bit of plot and character, a dash of suspense and climax, filling the cup . . .

You can s t r e t c h that metaphor (simile? Trope? Whatever!), you can personify it, you can dress it up in fine words and purple prose and take it for a walk, you can . . . do lots of things with it!

Oh, yeah. Write about it.

When we write, sometimes we just talk to ourselves -- but at least we're likely to get an intelligent answer, part of the time.