Annie's Texas Musings
  • Home
  • Annie's Blogs
    • February, 2016
    • January, 2016
    • December, 2015
    • April - 2015
    • March - 2015
    • February - 2015
    • January - 2015
    • December - 2014
    • November - 2014
    • March - 2014
    • February - 2014
    • January - 2014
    • December - 2013 >
      • Goodbye 2013
      • Morning Dove
      • Dark Garden
      • If I Tell You the Truth...
      • A Moment of Clarity
      • Mark Twain’s Top 9 Tips for Living a Kick-Ass Life
      • Dave Barry Wisdom for Christmas
      • Merry Christmas Baby!
      • My Year - Remembered 2013
      • Oh Christmas Tree
      • The Shadows We Cast - Joe Hesch
      • Grinched
      • Masks
      • Merry Christmas - Wrapped in Red
      • Monday Musings
      • Adventures in Glass Blowing
    • November >
      • No Choices
      • Sudden Storm
      • Ice Fall
      • One Saturday Night...
      • Gut Feelings
      • Silence
      • What You Want
      • My Corner
      • Lost
      • Relics
      • Waiting
      • Dreams
      • Melancholy Life
      • Obvious
      • My Debt (after Bernard Cooper)
      • This Time...
      • Blue
      • The Wind
      • Nightmare
      • Electric
      • In That Moment
      • What Came First?
      • Secret Name
      • Winter's Fight
      • Crossing Over
      • The Best House
      • Safety
      • Blowing in the Wind
      • My Home
    • October >
      • Enjoying Poe
      • All That Jazz
      • Water Baby
      • Blue-Black Nights
      • Lost
      • Tonight
      • Into the Light
      • I Come From...
      • Lies I Told You
      • Midnight Radio
      • Suspicions
      • In Death
      • Just Be
      • Mother's Gifts
      • What's in a Name?
      • Fire
      • Warning
      • As Far as He Could Go
      • The Oak
      • The History of Anger
      • Poetry...Found
      • Those Days
      • Enough
      • Midnight Train
      • Me
      • Small Mistakes
      • Stolen Moments
      • Dark Desire
      • Ocean Fog
      • The Forgotten
      • Denial
    • September >
      • Floating
      • The Night
      • A Study in Time - Micropoetry
      • Stalking Loneliness
      • Night Fall
      • Thoughts!
      • A Key
      • Surprises!
      • Ode to Autumn
      • Bonfire
      • Love?
      • Barefoot Princess
      • Life Landscapes
      • Shadows
      • Words
      • Secrets
      • Remember
      • Red Ant Highway
      • Underground
      • Me
      • Too Far
      • Haunting
      • Fallen
      • Mystery
      • Her Fate
      • Eavesdrop
      • Jealous
      • You
      • The Dance
      • Clouds
    • August >
      • Longing
      • Changes
      • Strong
      • Faith
      • Friends
      • Future
      • Landscape
      • Face in the Window
      • Winter
      • Life Choices
      • Knowledge
      • Sleep
      • Dark Nights
      • Evening Walk
      • Abandoned
      • Insecurities
      • Alone?
      • Signs
      • My Secret
      • Death of Love
      • Poet
      • First Meeting
      • Water Light
      • Fake
      • First
      • The View
      • Grandpa's Mystery
      • The Middle
      • Unremarkable Days
      • Misunderstood
      • Forever~
    • July >
      • All Along
      • The Eclipse...
      • Crocus Moon
      • Every Night
      • Movie Night
      • Taking a New Road
      • Privacy
      • Expectations
      • Anytime...
      • ...Ten Years
      • No Explanations
      • Choice
      • Unexpected
      • Unfocused
      • Unspoken
      • Betrayal
      • Going Home
      • A Study in Black and White
      • Senor ... Senorita
      • Night Owl
      • The Game
      • Love Letters
      • Only Here! Only Now!
      • The Garden Gate
      • That Kiss...
      • Poetry - Pablo Neruda
      • Rain
      • Hooked
      • Memory
      • The Edge
      • Just Passing Through
    • June >
      • Writing!
      • Harvest Moon
      • Small Change
      • What Will I Leave?
      • Fresh Sheets
      • French Quarter
      • Starlight
      • Katy Scarlett
      • The Rains Came
      • Flip Flop Queen!
      • The Wait
      • Glimpse
      • Summer Days
      • Secret Island
      • Bones in The Sky
      • Yes...I am a GEEK!
      • The Old Ones
      • Napping
      • PERKS!
      • Days Gone By
      • ... the Pines
      • The Other Side
      • Flash Fiction Challenge
      • Don't Be Sorry!
      • Trapped
      • Joys and Fears
      • Victim
      • Fear
      • Alone
      • Sacred
  • Archieves 2013
    • February >
      • Only a Dream
      • Twilight
      • Birthday Present
      • Blue
      • Reckless Abandon
      • My Star
      • Writing Practice: Words to Live By
      • Opal
      • War Dogs
      • Peach Picking Time
      • Texas Nights
      • The BOX
      • I'll Sleep When I'm Dead!
      • La Nuit!
      • Love is...
      • Valentine's Eve
      • Fat Tuesday
      • Oh How Happy!
      • Sarah Elizabeth
      • Dreams of Scotland
      • Train Sounds
      • Nearing Midnight
      • Inaugural Poetry
    • March >
      • The Last Time
      • Long Way Home
      • Today
      • San Antonio Rose
      • Dusk to Dawn
      • Signs
      • Caught I & II
      • Mesquites
      • Midnight
      • Your Life Story
      • Sometimes They are Just Words
      • Kiss My Grits!
      • Summer Fun
      • Dance Me to the End of Love
      • Lonesome
      • tomorrow
      • The Longing
      • Remember - Joy Harjo
      • Stargypsy
      • The End of the Road
      • My Mother's Eyes
      • My Father's Eyes
      • Mystery
      • Shooting Star
      • Hair - ARG!
      • Pink and White
      • This Much is Known ...
      • The Balcony
      • How Did it Happen?
    • April >
      • ... inside the Morning
      • Trapped
      • When Angels Fall
      • ... and Stars Align
      • Window Seat Rag!
      • My Left Arm Days 9 & 10
      • My Left Arm Day 8
      • My Left Arm Day 7
      • My Left Arm Day 6
      • My Left Arm Days 4 & 5
      • My Left Arm Day 3
      • My Left Arm
      • The Best Burger!
      • I still don't know...
      • Mom and Dad
      • April is National Poetry Month
      • Second Chances
      • Summer Rain
      • WIND
      • Exchange
      • Pain
      • Greet the Day
    • May >
      • Tears
      • Early Morning
      • The Color of Midnight
      • Silence
      • Supplication
      • Angels
      • Ball Lightning
      • Afternoon Moon
      • Morning Shadows
      • One Day ...
      • Painting
      • The Climb
      • Eavesdropping
      • Tarot
      • No Regrets
      • Rememberances
      • Abandoned
      • Why not...
      • Snake
      • The Ring
      • Harley
      • Rain
      • This is Love
      • Margin Notes
      • ...and I Fell
      • When We First Met
      • ...and there were dragons
      • ...Momma Said
      • TODAY
  • Reading List 2016
    • February, 2016
    • January 2016

Writing Practice:  Words to Live By

2/23/2013

0 Comments

 
Today, January 11, 2013, marks day 11 of my writing challenge and the lessons take a different focus. Daily lessons are now focusing on creating your writing space … this section is called The Writing Life. As with previous lessons, there are quotes from various writers as well as tips and/or suggestions for creating our personal writing space.

“Our task,” wrote John Updike, “is to rise above the setting, with its comforts and distractions, into a relationship with our ideal reader….”


This following section is on page 16 of the Writer’s Book of Days — typed as it appears on this page.

“Belief & Technique for Modern Prose — List of Essentials”

by Jack Kerouac

     1.  Scribble secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own

     2.  Submissive to everything, open, listening

     3.  Try never get drunk outside yr own house

     4.  Be in love with yr life

     5.  Something that you feel will find its own form

     6.  Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

     7.  blow as deep as you want to blow

     8.  Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind

     9.  The unspeakable vision of the individual

    10.  No time for poetry but exactly what is

    11.  Visionary tics shivering in the chest

    12.  In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you

    13.  Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

    14.  Like Proust, be an old teahead of time

    15.  Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

    16.  The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye

    17.  Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

    18.  Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea

    19.   Accept loss forever

    20.  Believe in the holy contour of life

    21.  Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind

    22.  Dont [sic] think of words when you stop but to see picture better

    23.  Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning

    24.  No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge

    25.  Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it

   26.  Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form

    27.  In Praide of Character in the bleak inhuman Loneliness

    28.  Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

    29.  You’re a Genius all the time

    30.  Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

                                                                                          As ever, Jack

As I read the 30 List of Essentials, I tried to pick which would be the most important to me.  Of course number 1 speaks to the heart of any writer, but I really am attached to number 13.  When we write, we need to get those thoughts on paper and not worry about the mechanics…editing takes care of that and sometimes editing can and does go on forever.  As fledgling writer, I tend to edit a piece to death. I need to leave things alone except for the spelling and structural errors and go with the purity of what was written as the words flowed from my mind through my arm and onto the paper or computer screen.  That type of writing goes directly to number 28…I especially like “crazier the better”.

I can see this year to be an interesting one.  In only 11 days, I have seen parts of me I did not know, that I forgot and have been reminded of from childhood … going from the many moves across Texas to describing how I received a wound and resulting scar when I was in third grade.  The daily topics keep me on my toes and thinking, always thinking…always trying to “show not tell” as Joyce Carroll Armstrong continually tried to teach me as she was my first teacher along the road to becoming a better writer.

Musical Muse with this writing,  iPod turned on with songs in the “B” section alphabetically … first song was my boy Rod Stewart and Baby Jane and it just better from there.

As always, I leave you with blessings and light, joy and happiness, but most of all LOVE.

As Ever, Annie (al la Jack!)

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    As I continue on this journey to improve my writing, I have found some good advice along the way.  Today's blog was previously posted on my other site, but I felt it deserved a place here as well.

    Annie

    Archives

    February 2013

    Categories

    All
    Memories
    Writing

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.