Try not to become disappointed if someone doesn't like a story you've written. Stick up for your ideas, but listen to what other people say, too. They might have good advice.
Margaret MahyRead
Of course there are big differences in length and character and vocabulary, but each level has its particular pleasures when it comes to the words one can use and the way one uses them.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the unique joys and pleasures found in different types of writing, regardless of their complexity or style.
Margaret Mahy suggests that while various forms of writing differ in length, character, and vocabulary, each has its own distinct pleasures. This could imply that writers can find satisfaction in the diverse ways they can express themselves and that the richness of language provides unique experiences at every level of writing, from simple to complex.
In practice
During a writing workshop, one might use this quote to encourage participants to explore various writing styles.
Try not to become disappointed if someone doesn't like a story you've written. Stick up for your ideas, but listen to what other people say, too. They might have good advice.
Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.
By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had even taken over someone else's life.
When you are reading, someone has done a lot of work on your behalf, someone has had ideas and has then written and corrected and improved them so that they can be shared.
Perhaps every time anyone is praised it means that someone else somewhere is going to be ignored
It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
I have been attacked in Turkey more for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do not read novels there.
For me alone Don Quixote was born and I for him. His was the power of action, mine of writing.
Chapter One. The Bride." He held up the book then. "I'm reading it to you for relax." He practically shoved the book in my face. "By S. Morgenstern. Great Florinese writer. The Princess Bride. He too came to America. S. Morgenstern. Dead now in New York. The English is his own. He spoke eight tongues." Here my father put down the book and held up all his fingers. "Eight. Once in Florin City...
the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery,” as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.
I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.
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