observe, analyze, understand

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

- Pablo Picasso (via literary-ethnography)

Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Others call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves, this nonsense makes perfect sense. And to those who put it into practice, this loftiness has roots that go deep.

- Lao Tzu (via thecalminside)

Don’t share work-in-progress with non-writers. Indeed, don’t even discuss it. Think of work-in-progress as an egg around which the shell has not yet hardened. I told my wonderful husband, a newspaper editor, my idea for a scene I wanted to write. ‘It sounds like a cliché to me,’ he said. I winced—but as an editor on a daily deadline, his job is to derail weak ideas before they waste anyone’s time. As a fiction writer, mine is to trust my ideas, follow them around dark corners and see what turns up. Thankfully, I wrote my scene. The story won a prize that took me to Russia, ran in a top literary magazine, and was published in my first book.

- Dylan Landis (via mttbll)

(Source: writersdigest.com)