We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.
Interpretation
Writers tend to embed personal elements in their work, revealing part of themselves through their writing.
This quote by Ross Macdonald emphasizes the idea that writers gradually infuse their personal experiences and identity into their craft. As they grow in skill, they inevitably leave traces of their individuality in their works, similar to how a burglar leaves behind evidence. This highlights the intimate connection between the writer and their creations, where the act of writing becomes a means of self-revelation.
In practice
In a talk about the writing process during a workshop, one might say, 'As writers, we often leave our fingerprints on our stories, revealing who we are.'
Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone brought such grace and skill to the reconstruction of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Charles R. Knight, most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day.
With this mistake I deprived myself of the possibility to make a contribution to the treasury of chess art.
Whenever I think about movies, I always look at that art process as having the best of a lot of worlds. Because if you watch a great film, you have a musical element to it, not just on the scoring, but in the way that the shots are edited - that has music and rhythm and time.
Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend. What all great gardens have in common are their ability to pull the sensitive viewer out of him or herself and into the garden, so completely that the separate self-sense disappears entirely, and at least for a brief moment one is ushered into a nondual and timeless awareness. A great garden, in other words, is mystical no matter what its actual content.
While all the other kids were out playing ball and stuff, I used to stay in my room and imagine that there was a camera in the wall. And I used to really believe that I was putting on a television show and that it was going out to somewhere in the world.
The anarchist painter is not the one who will create anarchist pictures, but the one who will fight with all his individuality against official conventions.
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