Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
Interpretation
Writing enables individuals to express thoughts and feelings that are often hard to admit.
In this quote, Helene Cixous emphasizes the complexity of writing as an art form that serves as a crucial tool for articulating inner truths and hidden emotions that might otherwise remain unspoken. The act of writing is portrayed as a multifaceted task that requires both skill and courage, suggesting that the process can be fraught with challenges as it navigates through the 'unavowable' experiences that individuals may struggle to express.
In practice
In a workshop on creative writing, to inspire participants to dig deeper into their personal stories.
By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display - the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. _x000D_ Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.
You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.
Only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way.
We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.
If my desire is possible, it means the system is already letting something else through.
Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.
My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It's morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it's emotionally and spiritually empowering.
I adore the theater and I am a painter. I think the two are made for a marriage of love. I will give all my soul to prove this once more.
When I have to score a film, I watch the movie first and then start thinking about it. And from that moment on, it is as if I were pregnant. I then have to deliver the child, so from that moment on, I think always about the music - even when I go to the grocery store, I think about it.
I don't want people who want to dance; I want people who have to dance.
The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.
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