A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.
Katherine Anne PorterRead
Most people won't realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
Interpretation
Writing is a skill that requires practice and learning over time.
Katherine Anne Porter's quote emphasizes that writing is not just a natural talent but a craft that can be honed through dedicated practice and study. Just like any other profession, aspiring writers should approach it with the mindset of an apprentice, recognizing the need for continuous learning and improvement to master the art of writing.
In practice
In a writing workshop, you could use this quote to encourage participants to embrace the learning process.
A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.
Writing, in any sense that matters, cannot be taught. It can only be learned by each separate one of us in his own way, by the use of his own powers of imagination and perception, the ability to learn the lessons he has set for himself.
You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.
They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.
Miracles are instantaneous, they cannot be summoned, but come of themselves, usually at unlikely moments and to those who least expect them.
Now and again thousands of memories _x000D_ converge, harmonize, _x000D_ arrange themselves around a central idea _x000D_ in a coherent form, _x000D_ and I write a story.
The competitions between fiction and nonfiction, short and long, electronic and paper, are not battles in which there can be only one victor. After all, we exist in a world where more kinds of writing than ever are greeted with interest and enthusiasm.
I think kids in every minority need to see people like themselves in books; that's an acknowledgment of their existence on this planet and in this society.
The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. Because I have the greatest respect for the reader, and if he's going to the trouble of reading what I've written -- I'm a slow reader myself and I guess most people are -- why, the least I can do is make it as easy as possible for him to find out what I'm trying to say, trying to get at. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.
A teacher is never a giver of truth; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself.
We think of speaking as something we do naturally, without any effort. But like playing music, it requires attention and knowledge and practice.
It is the way to educate your eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop.
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