Sterling Terrell

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If You Want to Write, By: Brenda Ueland

If You Want to Write, By: Brenda Ueland

If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
By: Brenda Ueland
Sublime Books (March 5, 2014)
128 pages

If You Want to Write is a book of artistic encouragement. I found this little volume a delight. Ueland spends half the book encouraging and showing proof that most people are capable of writing beautifully. The key is not to put on a pretense. Just describe things as they are. Bescribe this as YOU see and feel them. (Most professional writers get there with persistence and a bit of luck – if you want to know the truth.) You are capable of so much! Keep going!

Two of my favorite quotes:

Finally I said: “Describe something just as it is. Do not worry if it is angular and clumsy or how it comes out. Just look at something and put down what you see. Remember William Blake who said: ‘Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.’”56 56 The truth, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc., everything is smoothed out to seem plausible,—villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word of it.

So if you want your children to be musicians, then work at music yourself, seriously and with all your intelligence. If you want them to be scholars, study hard yourself. If you want them to be honest, be honest yourself. And so it goes. And that is why I would say to the worn and hectored mothers in the class who longed to write and could find not a minute for it: “If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say: ‘Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!’ you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.”

Buy this book.


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Filed Under: BooksTagged With: #Books, #MyReadingLife2021

Booked Up – Archer City, TX

Booked Up – Archer City, TX

Stop the world, I finally got to visit Booked Up in Archer City, TX.

If you don’t know, Booked Up is one of the last great independent used bookstores of Texas.

It’s famous because it is owned by Larry McMurtry (the guy who wrote Lonesome Dove and a hundred other books you should go read right now).

And Booked Up is not in some big city!

It’s in Larry’s hometown, a place with a population of ~1,800.

Archer City is one of those cities that is so common across rural Texas. Of course it has a Dairy Queen, a gas station or two, a cemetery, a courthouse, a small town square, a handful of abandon buildings, a little post office, a school, and a number of churches.

I have been wanting to go since grad school and have never made it.

At one time the store had over 300,000 books!

Today they still boast over 100,000 volumes.

Anyway – I got to go and browse the stacks for about an hour with the entire fam, which was just the coolest thing ever.

Their sign in Building 2 made me laugh:

If you are unable to locate an employee in this building

Please feel free to wander around yelling “yoo-hoo” and peering into storage rooms until completely frustrated. Then proceed to building one where you will find patronizing employees busy at work or sitting around drinking coffee, laughing at you.

Thank you

I bought a copy of Salvador, By: Joan Didion (Amazon).

(For more Didion, watch: The Center Will Not Hold)

The kids insisted that I buy them a little volume of Jacques Cousteau titled The Ocean World Of Jacques Cousteau (Volume 14).

I could have stayed for a week snooping around.

Must. Go. Back.

It might be worth an occasional trip to Oklahoma City just to have the excuse to stop in.

Booked Up - Archer City, TX

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Filed Under: PotpourriTagged With: #Books, #Library

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