Writing is not about making a buck, not about publishers and agents. Writing is not about feeling good. Writing is about pain, suffering, hard work, risk, and fear.
Interpretation
Writing is a challenging and emotional process that goes beyond commercial success.
Sue Grafton emphasizes that writing is fundamentally an art form that involves deep emotional struggles and significant personal sacrifice. It is not simply a means to financial gain or a source of emotional comfort; instead, it demands rigorous effort, vulnerability, and the courage to confront one's fears and pain through the act of creation.
In practice
During a writing workshop, I shared this quote to illustrate the dedication required in writing.
Except for cases that clearly involve a homicidal maniac, the police like to believe murders are committed by those we know and love, and most of the time they're right - a chilling thought when you sit down to dinner with a family of five. All those potential killers passing their plates.
My second husband and I were going through a bitter divorce, and I didn't have the money for a fancy-pants attorney. I didn't know how to fight, so I'd lie awake at night and think of ways to kill him. But I knew I'd get caught, so I decided to put it in a book and get paid for it! I always think it's odd that a whole career came out of that homicidal impulse.
There are days when none of us can bear it, but the good comes around again. Happiness is seasonal, like anything else. Wait it out. There are people who love you. People who can help.
So much of the past in encapsulated in the odds and ends. Most of us discard more information about ourselves than we ever care to preserve. Our recollection of the past is not simply distorted by our faulty perception of events remembered but skewed by those forgotten. The memory is like twin orbiting stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.
Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.
A woman should never, never, never be financially dependent to anyone, especially a man, because the minute you were dependent, you could be abused.
To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, To raise the genius, and to mend the heart
I never read anything concerning my work. I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read.
Look at a football field. It looks like a big movie screen. This is theatre. Football combines the strategy of chess. It's part ballet. It's part battleground, part playground. We clarify, amplify and glorify the game with our footage, the narration and that music, and in the end create an inspirational piece of footage.
Variety is more than a means of avoiding boredom, since art is more than an entertainment of the senses.
It must be extremely uncomfortable to live with a writer - all that preoccupation and brooding.
There have been times when I'm writing about things that are personally embarrassing. Like any human being, sometimes I can't help but wonder - 'What are the people I know going to think about this?' So I have to remind myself that all is permissible. Art has to be a free space. Language has to be a free space.
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