If Laura was so prolific with poems, and in truth she was, then what was the problem with Megan’s request? Couldn’t Laura, with a little doing, keep stringing together line after line of words and construct, in time, a novel? It seemed logical, but there was the matter of finding an idea and sustaining it. Only fire could do that. The fire of rebellion.Mario Vargas Llosa had not used the term “fire” exactly, but rather had discussed the presence of “seditious roots” that could “dynamite the world” the writer inhabited. He claimed that writing stories was an exercise in freedom and quarreling—out-and-out rebellion, whether or not the writer was conscious of it. And this rebellion, Vargas Llosa reminded his readers, was why the Spanish Inquisition had strictly censored works of fiction, prohibiting them for three hundred years in the American colonies.

During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent sixteen hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instance of that time tempted to eat or look at my watch. By contrast, if seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can't be the whole story. I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick.

Well, Betsy," he said, "your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith's trunk for a desk. That's fine. You need a desk. I've often noticed how much you like to write. The way you eat up those advertising tablets from the store! I never saw anything like it. I can't understand it though. I never write anything but checks myself. ""Bob!" said Mrs. Ray. "You wrote the most wonderful letters to me before we were married. I still have them, a big bundle of them. Every time I clean house I read them over and cry.""Cry, eh?" said Mr. Ray, grinning. "In spite of what your mother says, Betsy, if you have any talent for writing, it comes from family. Her brother Keith was mighty talented, and maybe you are too. Maybe you're going to be a writer."Betsy was silent, agreeably abashed."But if you're going to be a writer," he went on, "you've got to read. Good books. Great books. The classics.

Adam Kuambiana umerudi nyumbani ulikotoka, ukiongozwa na imani na mwanga wa wale uliowapenda na kuwapoteza. Hatuwezi kukumbuka kwamba umetutoka bila kukumbuka kwamba uliishi, na kwamba maisha yako yalitupa kumbukumbu nzuri tusizoweza kuzisahau haraka. Jumanne, siku ya kuuaga mwili uliokuwa ukitumiwa na wewe, wengine watasema Kwa heri lakini mimi nitasema Asante! Asante kwa sababu ya kipaji chako. Asante kwa sababu ya kujitahidi kwa kadiri ya uwezo wako wote, kutoa sauti kwa wale wote waliokuwa hawawezi kusikika. Asante kwa sababu ya kuacha dunia katika hali nzuri kuliko ulivyoikuta wakati ukiingia, na Asante kwa sababu ya maisha yako. Tukiendelea kuomboleza kifo cha Adam Kuambiana hapa duniani, wengine wanasherehekea kukutana naye huko mbinguni. Mchungaji wa uhai wa wote Mungu wa mbinguni ailaze roho yake mahali pema peponi: Yeye ni mwandishi wa hadithi ya maisha yetu na ndiye aliyeandika ukurasa wa mwisho wa hadithi ya Adam.

A Letter to Andre Breton, Originally Composed on a Leaf of Lettuce With an Ink-dippedCarrotOn my bed, my green comforterdraped over my knees like a lumpy turtle,I think about the Berlin Wall of years that separates us.In my own life, the years are beginning to stack uplike a Guinness World Record’s pile of pancakes,yet I’m still searching for some kind of syrup to believe in.In the shadows of my pink sheet, I see your face, Desnos’ face,and two clock faces staring at each other. I see a gaping woundthat ebbs rose petals, while a sweaty armpitholds an orchestra. Beethoven, maybe.A lover sings a capella, with the frothiness of a cappuccino.Starbucks, maybe. There’s an hourglass, too, and beneath the sandslie untapped oil reserves. I see Dali’s mustache,Magritte’s pipe, and bowling shoes, which leaves the question--If you could time travel through a trumpet, would you findtoday and tomorrow too loud?

It was a very ordinary day, the day I realised that my becoming is my life and my home and that I don't have to do anything but trust the process, trust my story and enjoy the journey. It doesn't really matter who I've become by the finish line, the important things are the changes from this morning to when I fall asleep again, and how they happened, and who they happened with. An hour watching the stars, a coffee in the morning with someone beautiful, intelligent conversations at 5am while sharing the last cigarette. Taking trains to nowhere, walking hand in hand through foreign cities with someone you love. Oceans and poetry. It was all very ordinary until my identity appeared, until my body and mind became one being. The day I saw the flowers and learned how to turn my daily struggles into the most extraordinary moments. Moments worth writing about. For so long I let my life slip through my fingers, like water. I'm holding on to it now,and I'm not letting go.

मेरी उम्मीद का सागर कुछ यूँ छूटा है......................................कि हर ज़र्रे-ज़र्रे ने हमको लूटा है.............................................कश्तियाँ सारी डूब गयी किनारों तक आते-आते........................होसला जो कुछ भी बचा था तूफानों में, किनारों पर आकर टूटा है

Jednog dana, pisac otkriva da nije više u stanju ništa da napiše. Šta god pokuša, kojim god putem krene, ne uspeva da stigne do celovite rečenice. U prvi mah, pisac se ne predaje i pokušava bezbroj puta da sastavi makar jednu prihvatljivu rečenicu, ali reči se odupiru, odbijaju da ga slušaju ili se uopšte ne odazivaju na njegove usplahirene pozive, i pisac polako popušta, diže ruke, pravi se da je nezainteresovan, nadajući se da će se reči prevariti i doći da vide šta je s njim, zašto ga nema. Ali reči su lukave, reči su prošle sito i rešeto i ne pada im na kraj pameti da se liše novostečene slobode. I dok one veselo trče i dobacuju se uskličnicima, pisac pomišlja da postane mimičar. Ali ni tamo ga ne primaju, odvratni su im onemeli pisci, i tako piscu ne preostaje ništa drugo nego da se zaposli u zoološkom vrtu. I eno, tamo je, hrani pingvine. (Pisac bez reči)

... and it was quite a sad thing,the way I watched you sleep like nothing could go wrong and I did not want to harm it, I did not want to blur it, but how could I notwhen everything I’ve ever known has slowly gone awayand I know by now that that’s the way you let the new day in with new roads and views and chances to growbut it was quite a sad thing because I don’t want this to ever become ’then’ or ’was’ and it was quite an unfamiliar thing. The way I took off my shoes again, put down my bag and quietly went back to bed, slowly between the sheets of moments I don’t want to leaveand it was quite a beautiful thing the way you had no idea but still must have known because you did not even open your eyes, but turned around and took my hand and you were still asleep, breathing in and out like nothing could go wrong, but still held my hand like you were glad I didn’t leave. ’Thank you for staying’and it was quite a wonderful thing, the way I smiled and so did you, sound asleep, and that’s all I need to know for now. That’s all I want to know for now.

La mia novella di Natale, Un Cuore nella Bufera, inizia così...Mi sveglio di soprassalto, gli occhi spalancati nel buio, la notte rischiarata dal bagliore della neve che fuori continua a cadere. Trattengo il respiro, quasi in preda al panico. Non oso muovermi.Qualcosa non va.Mi faccio coraggio e giro appena il viso.Qualcosa decisamente non va.C’è un uomo incollato alla mia schiena. Il suo braccio destro mi stringe la vita, la sua mano avvolge il mio seno e che io sia dannata se quello che sento premere contro la mia schiena non è il suo…Oh.Mio.Dio!Mi alzo di scatto, accendo la luce del comodino e sbalordita fisso l’intruso. Mugugnando, quello si volta dall’altra parte, innocente come un serafino. Il suo cane-orso, ai piedi del letto, apre un occhio, poi riappoggia il grosso muso sulle zampe e riprende a russare. Il mio sguardo passa da uno all’altro senza posa, mentre invano cerco di respirare. Finalmente un refolo d’aria s’infila lungo i bronchi e cede ai polmoni l’ossigeno necessario affinché io possa elaborare una domanda sensata.Che cavolo ci fa Kyle Hartson nel mio letto?

The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn't guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, casually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it's yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division.("Introduction")

Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partlynatural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, mostof which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity orincivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections);obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal tobelieve what all sensible people know is true); childishness (anapparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondnessfor daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of properrespect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for cryingover nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixationor both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking,smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness andneatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes);remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usualfeature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strangeadmixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness,the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelingsfor or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak ofcunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness,and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurableaddiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good.

A lady sent me an email recently advising me to change my environment. I guess she read through the lines of my writing and I had adequately painted a portrait of my experiences for her to form a conclusion that melancholia and fatalistic views of my protagonist reveals the depth or layers of my own consciousness. I haven't experienced much of life at twenty five but I've noticed enough, more than most people do at my age. I won't lie that sometimes it leaves me menacingly depressed. I only represent myself. I am in no competition with anyone. I often muse that if people were half concerned about wars and crimes, corruption in high places and poverty with the heavy regard they place upon other's lives then we would have a better world. Just imagine if the average man on the road heckled politicians the way they are often inclined to insult a fat woman. I have a Ton load of bad experiences but I have not allowed them to deter me, people will think about them at some high point in my life and try to use it to besmirch whatever glory I may attain. I understand that too, they can use it for whatever barometer on their lives they see fit but as for me, I used my crash falls as stairwells to greatness. Sometimes I feel alone because I am youthful and curious about life and people judge me for it and oftentimes it leaves me feeling lonely and asocial. You see the deep thinker has to be careful, the shallow minded will take one look and paint him as madness.

Haven't I told you scores of times, that you're always beginners, and the greatest satisfaction was not in being at the top, but in getting there, in the enjoyment you get out of scaling the heights? That's something you don't understand, and can't understand until you've gone through it yourself. You're still at the state of unlimited illusions, when a good, strong pair of legs makes the hardest road look short, and you've such a mighty appetite for glory that the tiniest crumb of success tastes delightfully sweet. You're prepared for a feast, you're going to satisfy your ambition at last, you feel it's within reach and you don't care if you give the skin off your back to get it! And then, the heights are scaled, the summits reached, and you've got to stay there. That's when the torture begins; you've drunk your excitement to the dregs and found it all too short and even rather bitter, and you wonder whether it was really worth the struggle. From that point there is no more unknown to explore, no new sensations to experience. Pride has had its brief portion of celebrity; you know that your best has been given and you're surprised it hasn't brought a keener sense of satisfaction. From that moment the horizon starts to empty of all hopes that once attracted you towards it. There's nothing to look forward to but death. But in spite of that you cling on, you don't want to feel you're played out, you persist in trying to produce something, like old men persist in trying to make love, with painful, humiliating results. ... If only we could have the courage to hang ourselves in front of our last masterpiece!

But, it didn’t matter that my mother suspected and knew that I was a writer. It was expected of me to take care of my share of the responsibility of making our way in the world as a family. In those days, also, it was unheard of, by us certainly, that to get any help, even from members of our own family, let alone from the government, which would have been disgraceful. Thank God that that kind of folly in thinking is obsolete. There is a temptation to feel, ‘Well, we all made it; why can’t these other poor people make it?’ And, of course, nothing is more than stupid than that attitude. I must confess that I find that attitude among many countrymen of my own who do find themselves taking undue pride in their own sense of ability — of being equal to any situation, and of seeing it through and improving it, and so on. And then, putting that against other people who don’t have that, and thereby implying that the other people are lazy. Not taking into account the whole different structure and identity and a people who have survived for centuries under very harsh conditions and members of a very great culture, and I am talking about the Indians, to begin with, in the Valley — the San Joaquin Valley, in Fresno, in Tulare, and the mountains, and there are many tribes of them, of different kinds, and I am talking about, also, the Mestizos, the mixtures of Mexican, Spaniards with Indians, making the Mexican. And I am talking about any minority which is considered by anybody as being innately of itself indolent. This kind of narrow thinking is a temptation to all sorts of people, and one has to be sympathetic with the people who are wrong, too, you see. It is not enough just to be sympathetic with the people who are belittled; it is necessary to be sympathetic with the people who belittle them. So, in worrying about the persecuted, one is obliged also to worry about the persecutors. I consider that a basic measure of growth.