On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
Joan Didion reflects on the personal and introspective nature of keeping a notebook, delving into memory, self-reflection, and the significance of past experiences.
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On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
She wrote on Hollywood and Washington, New York and Sacramento, Terri Schiavo and Martha Stewart, grief and hypocrisy and Latin American politics, and somehow it all drove toward the same point: Narratives are coping mechanisms. If we want to truly understand ourselves, we have to understand not just the stories we make up together, but the tales b... See more
Alissa Wilkinson • The Essential Joan Didion
I suppose that what I really wanted to say that day at my daughter’s school is that we never reach a point at which our lives lie before us as a clearly marked open road, never have and never should expect a map to the years ahead, never do close those circles that seem, at thirteen and fourteen and nineteen, so urgently in need of closing.
Joan Didion • After Henry: Essays
some of us writers start out wanting to write excellent fiction (or nonfiction, in my case) and then get stuck because that’s . . . the wrong starting point? At the end of the day, the writing is just a vehicle for something else—some feeling about the world or human experience that you want to suggest or precipitate in your readers.
Mason Currey • What if your ambition outstrips your talent?
In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind . It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole... See more