Writing Notebook

Miscellaneous Quotes and cool things to inspire writers. I dedicate this page to nrkii and Ping, fellow babblers who write (who have inspired me).

From Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L’Engle:

If the work comes to the artist and says, “Here I am, serve me,” then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve. The amount of the artist’s talent is not what it is about. Jean Rhys said to an interviewer in the Paris Review, “Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.”

To feed the lake is to serve, to be a servant. Servant is another unpopular word, a word we have derided by denigrating servants and service. To serve should be a privilege, and it is to our shame that we tend to think of it as a burden, something to do if you’re not fit for anything better or higher.

I have never served a work as it ought to be served; my little trickle adds hardly a drop of water to the lake, and yet it doesn’t matter; there is no trickle too small. Over the years I have come to recognize that the work often knows more than I do. And with each book I start, I have hopes that I may be helped to serve it a little more fully. The great artists, the rivers and tributaries, collaborate with the work, but for most of us, it is our greatest privilege to be its servant.

Somewhere in pulling the chapters together I lost a few hundred words, probably by copying over part of one of the chapters. Too tired at the end of all this to track it down, I simply put what I had into the official word counter: 50099.

Here is the running tally:

Day 28: 2046
Day 27: 1897
Day 26: 1623
Day 25: 1310
b: 1836
Day 24: 1789
b: 971
Day 23: 2117
b: 944
Day 22: 1649
b: 1882
Day 21: zero
Day 20: 1326

Day 19: zero
Day 18: 2190
b: 1471
Day 17: zero
Day 16: 2039
Day 15: 1667
b: 1929
Day 14: zero
Day 13: 1559
Day 12: 1367
Day 11: 1666
b: 1078
c: 1642
Day 10: 2000
b: 1379
Day 9: zero
Day 8: zero
Day 7: zero
Day 6: 2150
Day 5: 1963
5b: 1714
Day 4: zero
Day 3: 1518
Day 2: 1940
Day 1: 1805

TOTAL WORDS: 50467

Goal: 50,000 +

% of goal: 101