Workshops Quotes - Page 6

• The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there's also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.

  Garth Stein

  Art, Book, Inspiration

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• I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written a poem that is a kind of parody of a garrulous poet at a poetry reading who spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the poem before reading it, I've written a number of satirical poems about other poets.

  Billy Collins

  Reading, Thinking, Numbers

  "A Brisk Walk". Interview with Joel Whitney, www.guernicamag.com. June 14, 2006.

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• Whatever one may say about the perils of workshops, they help writers internalize an awareness of audience.

  Debra Dean

  May, Helping, Awareness

  Source: therumpus.net

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• With my students, I don't offer any simple tips like that, maybe because my own process is pretty messy, but when we workshop we talk a lot about the deeper subject, which is what the story or novel is about. I think defining a narrative's themes can lay bare a narrative's tensions.

  Edan Lepucki

  Simple, Thinking, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• It does no one any good to say their novel sucks if you don't have an idea how to make it better, how to approach it from different angles and make it work. It's obviously a subjective process, right? But the thing about subjectivity, at least in the classroom, is that you're banking on your professor's subjectivity to be both personal and professional - that he or she has some sense about the world outside the workshop.

  Tod Goldberg

  Ideas, Doe, Different

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I read an interview with Daniel Woodrell once where he said something like, basically, if people had said what they said to him in a bar instead of workshop, he would have punched them...and I finally understood that when in a class with my wife. Every time someone said something about her work, I wanted to climb across the table and stab them in the neck with my pen. And these were people I liked and respected.

  Tod Goldberg

  Class, People, Wife

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I haven't taught creative writing all that much (my CW teaching consists of a few summer workshops for elementary school children and an eight-week class for older adults), and I don't really know what my teaching style is yet.

  Mary J. Miller

  Summer, Children, Teaching

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Some of the things I liked in my years as a student in workshops: the occasional in-class prompt; discussions about what it means to be a writer in the world; professors who are brutally honest and encouraging at the same time (this is a tough one).

  Mary J. Miller

  Mean, Years, Class

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I also liked it when professors assigned us stories that they love. In general, I liked workshops more when they were more than just a workshop, when the professor took the time to actually guide us as young writers and teach us things it took them a long time to figure out on their own. I could probably write ten pages on this question.

  Mary J. Miller

  Writing, Long, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Don't outline your stories. A lot of fiction workshops say you should. I say the opposite. I quote Grace Paley: "We write what we don't know we know."

  Andre Dubus

  Writing, Opposites, Grace

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• I heard a story the other night about an editor who visited the Iowa Workshop and, when asked what sorts of books she published, replied, "Classic books." One of the students asked her, "You mean like Kafka?" Apparently she said, "Oh, I don't think I would publish Kafka."

  Matthew Specktor

  Book, Mean, Night

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I was a sound engineer, and all of these gurus and shamans would come, and I would record the workshops they were teaching. And I took part in a shamanic journeying workshop, and this woman leading the workshop had brought Ayahuasca, which is a Peruvian hallucinogen and contains DMT.

  Larkin Grimm

  Teaching, Dmt, Ayahuasca

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I didn't write poems for a number of years after graduate school because the criticisms of other students in the workshops wouldn't quiet down in my mind when I tried to work.

  Kevin Keck

  Writing, School, Years

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Another response to racism has been the establishment of unlearning racism workshops, which are often led by white women. These workshops are important, yet they tend to focus primarily on cathartic individual psychological personal prejudice without stressing the need for corresponding change in political commitment and action. A woman who attends an unlearning racism workshop and learns to acknowledge that she is racist is no less a threat than one who does not. Acknowledgment of racism is significant when it leads to transformation.

  Bell Hooks

  Stress, Commitment, White

  "Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center". Book by Bell Hooks, 1984.

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• You were spying on us?" "It was kind of hard not to. You were right there by the workshop with Will. it looked like he was practically squishing you to death." "He wasn't," Ronnie assured him. "I'm just saying how it looked." She smiled. You'll understand when you're a little older.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Littles, Kind, Just Saying

  Nicholas Sparks (2009). “The Last Song”, p.151, Hachette UK

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• I collect puppet stuff. I have a puppet workshop in my garage. I was looking for any opportunity to be able to get very creatively involved in that world.

  Neil Patrick Harris

  Opportunity, World, Puppets

  "Neil Patrick Harris on YouTube show 'Neil's Puppet Dreams'". Interview with Adam B. Vary, www.ew.com. November 27, 2012.

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• One day God felt he ought to give his workshop a spring clean... It was amazing what ragged bits and pieces came from under his workbench as he swept. Beginnings of creatures, bits that looked useful but had seemed wrong, ideas he'd mislaid and forgotten... There was even a tiny lump of sun. He scratched his head. What could be done with all this rubbish?

  Ted Hughes

  Spring, Ideas, Giving

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• No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie--or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it?

  H. G. Wells

  Art, Lying, Believe

  H. G. Wells (2016). “The Time Machine”, p.90, H. G. Wells

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• This is ridiculous. I look like the Games Workshop version of a Jedi Knight.

  Jim Butcher

  Knights, Games, Looks

  Jim Butcher (2010). “The Dresden Files Collection 7-12”, p.3353, Penguin

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• Never let the brain idle. ‘An idle mind is the devil’s workshop.’ And the devil’s name is Alzheimer’s.

  George Carlin

  Alzheimer's, Names, Brain

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• The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.

  Anne Lamott

  Writing, Sheep, Needs

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.3, Anchor

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• I wouldn't just come home from school and watch TV everyday, they had me involved in lots of local theatre. I was a very dramatic, talkative child. And that was part of my mother's creative solution - to put me in workshops and classes and children's theatre programmes.

  Kerry Washington

  Mother, Children, Home

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• The remedy for life's broken pieces is not classes, workshops or books. Don't try to heal the broken pieces. Just forgive.

  Iyanla Vanzant

  Breakup, Book, Class

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• Democracy no longer means what it was meant to. It has been taken back into the workshop. Each of its institutions has been hollowed out, and it has been returned to us as a vehicle for the free market, of the corporations. For the corporations, by the corporations.

  Arundhati Roy

  Taken, Mean, Democracy

  "Arundhati Roy: 'The people who created the crisis will not be the ones that come up with a solution'". Interview with Arun Gupta, www.theguardian.com. November 30, 2011.

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• I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.

  Mary Oliver

  School, Might, Gathering

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