Write Like a Girl Post Card

Elements of Literature

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Eight Writers and the Walks that Inspired them.

(Source: The New York Times)

Literary Birthday - 21 April

Happy Birthday, Charlotte Brontë, born 21 April 1816, died 31 March 1855

Seven Charlotte Brontë Quotes

1. Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.
2. I’m just going to write because I cannot help it.
3. A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.
4. It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
5. I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.
6. I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!
7. The standard heroes and heroines of novels, are personages in whom I could never, from childhood upwards, take an interest, believe to be natural, or wish to imitate: were I obliged to copy these characters, I would simply — not write at all. Were I obliged to copy any former novelist, even the greatest, even Scott, in anything, I would not write — Unless I have something of my own to say, and a way of my own to say it in, I have no business to publish; unless I can look beyond the greatest Masters, and study Nature herself, I have no right to paint; unless I can have the courage to use the language of Truth in preference to the jargon of Conventionality, I ought to be silent.

Charlotte Brontë, an English novelist and poet, was the eldest of the three surviving Brontë sisters. She wrote Jane Eyre under the pen name Currer Bell.

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Daily Writing Prompt from Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 17 April

Happy Birthday, Nick Hornby, born 17 April 1957

10 Nick Hornby Quotes

1. The more you read about the value of literacy, the more you understand it’s everything, really. All statistics show the more kids read, the more likely they are to have successful lives. 
2. I don’t listen to music while I’m at the computer, but it is an important part of the working day—things tend to spark up better if I’m having an intense relationship with a song or an album.
3. I don’t want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them!
4. The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don’t need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.
5. All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. … But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.
6. Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.
7. Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.
8. I started by writing plays. When I left university and I tried to write, everything came out sounding like bad essays, so I thought I should stick to dialogue. I hadn’t done enough reading-not of the things I wanted to emulate-so it took me a while, a long while, to grapple with voice. Everything changed for me when I read Anne Tyler, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Lorrie Moore, all in about ‘86-‘87 … voice, tone, simplicity, humour, soul … all of these things seemed to be missing from the contemporary English fiction I’d looked at, and I knew then what I wanted to do.
9. I’m a 9 to 5 writer—I never work on weekends or in the evenings. I have an office round the corner from my home, so I drop a kid off at school and walk down the road, where invariably I waste the first few hours of the day writing e-mails, playing Solitaire, reading sports news on the Internet.
10. I think I do construct an ideal reader or listener. I always seem to think that I’m addressing some quite smart woman in her 30s. I don’t know why.

Hornby is an English novelist, essayist, lyricist, and screenwriter. He is best known for the novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, as well as for the football memoir Fever Pitch. His work frequently touches upon music, sport, and the aimless and obsessive natures of his protagonists. His books have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide

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by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Writing Trivia - What Ezra Pound thought…

‘When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:

1. Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.
2. The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.
3. The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well.
4. Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante’s time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare’s time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how.
5. Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch.
6. The starters of crazes.’

VIA Writers Wrte