Erica Lorraine Scheidt's Blog, page 8

Finishing a novel is always linked with shame—or rather, the lack of it. There's a moment when I realize I'm no longer ashamed of the jumble of words I've produced, that the embarrassment of having written a mishmash of ideas subsides and I'm no longer terrified of The Public reading it. This is when I begin to think of my manuscript as a novel. I never know when this is going to happen; during the writing of the manuscript, it sometimes feels as if that moment of clarity is never going to arrive, that the novel will never arise from the manuscript's fuzziness of thought and expression. I have friends who read the manuscript in its final stages, and this helps lessen the acute awkwardness of having to go public with my work: the comments give my work a kind of validity, a right to exist. Tash Aw in Daniel Alarcon's The Secret MiraclePhoto: Visiting Acrosanti from Gravel & Gold via Ready for the House

But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Moby Dick
Photo: Renee Lilley, Dead Horse Bay, Brooklyn NY, January 2012 by Elizabeth Weinberg

At first they had difficulties with the camera. Instead of framing someone's face, as they intended, they often photographed his knees or feet. There were no windows in the mountain huts where they slept, and they had rarely seen television, so the idea of "framing"was utterly foreign to them: they had never seen their surrounding through anything. I asked them to carry a piece of paper with a hole in it and look through it at everything they came upon. Within a couple of weeks the problem of using the viewfinder was solved.  Wendy Ewald in the introduction to Magic Eyes; Scenes from an Andean Girlhood

I get asked a lot what my editor made me change, what the “original” versions of my novels looked like, etc. The truth is that novels are not written by one person. Novels are a collaboration—for almost a decade now, my closest collaborator has been Julie Strauss-Gabel, my editor at Dutton. But I also collaborate with copyeditors and proofreaders and with every single person who reads the book, because the reader chooses how to read a novel (which paragraphs to skim, which to reread, how to fill in a novel’s many blanks).So please believe me when I say that you ARE reading the original version of The Fault in Our Stars or Looking for Alaska or whatever. And you are reading the only original version that will ever exist, because the book you read will not be quite the same as the book that anyone else reads. John Green. 

All right, but it's an unpleasant one. Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through. And then, but only then, the thing will go on its own power, it will hold the reins, and you need do nothing but hang on.Cynthia Ozick in the GuardianPhoto: Johanna Burke in Freunde von Freunden

What are your other inspirations? 
Aside from literary friendships and books and writing? I can admit to no others. Strait is the gate.
Cynthia Ozick in the GuardianMargaret Kilgallen, Untitled, c. 2000 via SF Weekly

I love you to pieces, distraction, etc. Franny and Zooey, JD SalingerPhoto: Jessica Barensfel and Simon Howell on Freunde von Freunden

I love everything about Rookie and everything about this.

I've been thinking about writing, how we create from life. It's complicated, of course. Stephen Elliott in today's Daily Rumpus. Painting: Narangkar Glover, Shangri-La Girls School: A Thousand Stairs, 2010

The leitmotif is constant change. Nina Yashar in W Magazine.
Photo: The Sartorialist