Week 6: Storylab Advice to Writers

 

Writermag.com

Advice to Writers

You've Got to Work It Over March 03, 2021

Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself. That’s the true test of writing. When you can do that, the reader gets the kick and you don’t get any. You just get hard work and the better you write the harder it is because every story has to be better than the last one. It’s the hardest work there is. I like to do and can do many things better than I can write, but when I don’t write I feel like shit. I’ve got the talent and I feel that I’m wasting it.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

I like this advice the best. You have to put in the work and effort to achieve anything. You can't just manifest your book into existence. I think there's a lot of advice regarding writing, and the most basic part is just doing it. Just sitting down and writing something is better than writing nothing at all. 

A Novel Takes Over a Writer's Life February 28, 2021

I just write what I want to write. Quiet is very beautiful to me, the medium of everything that matters. I'm grateful for the patience of my readers, certainly. But the fact is that a novel takes over a writer's life for literal years. What I write, day by day and word by word, is much of my felt life. It would be a terrible capitulation to give up my explorations of quiet because of anxiety about the receptiveness of readers. I have found that readers are very much to be trusted.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON

 

 I also quite like this advice. I think it's good to enjoy the "quiet" of your work, and not be consumed with every minuscule detail. Sometimes it's good to just let the writing flow instead of building an entire plan for every sentence. Those kinds of works tend to be tedious (in my opinion).

 

Writers Are Forever Remembering February 16, 2021

They straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places...but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering.... All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.

TONI MORRISON

 

 

 

Even her advice is poetic. 

 

I really adore Toni Morrison. This advice is beautifully written (like everything Morrison writes). I think remembering is what really connects an author to their writing, and makes their pieces truly a part of who they are. 

Week 6 Reading: Anicent Egypt Part B

Sheet from the Tale of Two Brothers, Papyrus D'Orbiney, British Museum

 

Anpu (Anubis) - Brother of Bata. Kills his wife after she lied about Bata trying to seduce her.

"Before the Greeks arrived in Egypt, around the 7th century BC, the god was known as Anpu or Inpu. The root of the name in ancient Egyptian language means "a royal child." Inpu has a root to "inp," which means "to decay."" - wiki

 

Bata - Brother of Anpu. Anpu's wife tries to seduce him, then lies about it. He appeals to his brother, and tells him the truth. After he is resurrected, he confronts his wife as a bull, then as a tree. As he's being cut down, a splinter falls into his wife's mouth, impregnating her. He's reborn as their son, and takes the throne along with Anpu.

"Until the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty Bata was represented as a ram and later as a bull. Bata is probably identical with the death god Bt of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, known from the Saqqara necropolis, for instance from the Mastaba of Ti. Bata is not mentioned in the Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts." - wiki

Ennead - "Nine deities in Egyptian mythology worshiped at Heliopolis: the sun god Atum; his children Shu and Tefnut; their children Geb and Nut; and their children Osiris, Isis, Seth, and Nephthys." - wiki

Creates a wife for Bata

Bata's Wife - Divinely created, and sought after by the Pharaoh. After Bata's resurrection, she attempts to thwart him by eating his liver in his bull form, then cutting him down in his tree form. As the tree is cut down, a splinter falls into her mouth and impregnates her.

 

Week 6 Reading: Ancient Egyptian Myths and Stories Part A

 

Hathor, in bovine form, emerges from a hill representing the Theban necropolis, in a copy of the Book of the Dead from the 13th century BC. (source: wiki)

Gods:

Nu - Oldest of the ancient Egyptian gods and father of Ra, the sun god.

Nun's name means “primeval waters,” and he represented the waters of chaos out of which Re-Atum began creation. ... Nun was also thought to continue to exist as the source of the annual flooding of the Nile River

Ra - Sun God. He was often considered to be the King of the Gods and thus the patron of the pharaoh and one of the central gods of the Egyptian pantheon. He was also described as the creator of everything.

Isis - Goddess of the moon. As goddess of life and magic, Isis protected women and children, and healed the sick. She was the sister and wife of Osiris. Isis and Osiris had a son named Horus.

Shu - God of the air and supporter of the sky, created by Atum by his own power, without the aid of a woman. Shu and his sister and companion, Tefnut (goddess of moisture), were the first couple of the group of nine gods called the Ennead of Heliopolis

Tefnut - Deity of moisture, moist air, dew and rain in Ancient Egyptian religion. She is the sister and consort of the air god Shu and the mother of Geb and Nut.

Seb - the Egyptian god of the earth and a mythological member of the Ennead of Heliopolis. he could also be considered a father of snakes. It was believed in ancient Egypt that Geb's laughter created earthquakes and that he allowed crops to grow.

Nut - goddess of the sky, vault of the heavens, often depicted as a woman arched over the earth god Geb. ... As the goddess of the sky, Nut swallowed the sun in the evening and gave birth to it again in the morning

Hathor - goddess associated, later, with Isis and, earlier, with Sekhmet but eventually was considered the primeval goddess from whom all others were derived. She is usually depicted as a woman with the head of a cow, ears of a cow, or simply in cow form