Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

Tell Sweet Lies Or Bitter Truths

Tell Sweet Lies Or Bitter Truths

To write is to entertain.

To document, maybe.

Like every other art, it prods the consumer to feel the same emotion as the creator.

And people seem to love themselves as much as they like being part of something bigger.

But writing like everything else pops best when it is the opposite of what everyone is expecting.

I think he believed that our job, the job of a writer, is not to get up and say, “Tomorrow, in battle, most of you will die.…” Instead, a writer must entertain the troops the night before. I think he believed that the best way to entertain the troops is to tell stories, and the ones that they seem to like the best are ones about themselves. You can tell sweet lies or bitter truths, and both seem to help, but it’s like Czeslaw Milosz said when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”
–Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions

Write As If You Were Dying?

Write As If You Were Dying?

Here, the remarkable, Annie Dillard offers two more tips on the literary life.

1. Clarify your message.
2. You can write anything from anywhere.

This resonates with me because of all the noise out there.

And the fact that people are naturally drawn to clarity.

You should write what tugs at your heart.

And second, don’t let your geography limit your pen.

It seems like you are simply making another excuse.

“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality? Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.”

–Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Sterling Terrell