Let's face it, writing is hell.
Interpretation
Writing can be an incredibly difficult and painful process.
William Styron's quote highlights the struggles and challenges that writers often face in their creative process. It suggests that despite the passion and joy that can come from writing, it is often accompanied by feelings of frustration, doubt, and hardship, making it a taxing endeavor akin to 'hell'.
In practice
In a writing workshop, a facilitator might share this quote to encourage participants to embrace the difficulties of their craft.
The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.
my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
In depression . . . faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute . . . It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
Writing is a fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats... for jittery people.
Documentaries deal with people who live real, everyday lives. But if these people trusted us and told us the truth about their lives, it could be used against them - which sometimes happened.
So What or Kind of Blue were done in that era, the right hour, the right day. It's over; it's on the record.
She knew this music--knew it down to the very core of her being--but she had never heard it before. Unfamiliar, it had still always been there inside her, waiting to be woken. It grew from the core of mystery that gives a secret its special delight, religion its awe. It demanded to be accepted by simple faith, not dissected or questioned, and at the same time, it begged to be doubted and probed.
A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting.
Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.
The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not.
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