Writing simply means no dependent clauses, no dangling things, no flashbacks, and keeping the subject near the predicate. We throw in as many fresh words we can get away with. Simple, short sentences don't always work. You have to do tricks with paci...
You try to make the most of each day. I'm not big into setting real specific goals. I think, really, if you just focus on every day - and I know that's the oldest cliche in the book, but it really is true. Day 1 of camp means just as much as Day 17 o...
I thought of you and how you love this beauty, And walking up the long beach all alone I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder As you and I once heard their monotone. Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me The cold and sparkling silver of...
The idea of reappropriation isn’t a new one. The process of turning negative words, symbols, or ideas into positive parts of our own identity – was used for social justice movements long before hipsters thought that being ironic was cool. Whether...
I have an idea and a first line -- and that suggests the rest of it. I have little concept of what I’m going to say, or where it’s going. I have some idea of how long it’s going to be -- but not what will happen or what the themes will be. That...
Twas now the very witching time of night, When churchyards groan, and graves give up their dead, And many a mischievous, enfranchised sprite Had long since burst his bonds of stone or lead, And hurried off, with schoolboy-like delight, To play his pr...
The strong manly ones in life are those who understand the meaning of the word patience. Patience means restraining one's inclinations. There are seven emotions: joy, anger, anxiety, adoration, grief, fear, and hate, and if a man does not give way to...
Everybody's got skeletons in the closets. Every once in a while, you've got to open up the closet and the let the skeletons breathe. Half the time, the very thing you think is gonna destroy you or ruin you is the very thing that nobody cares about. M...
Susan stared at him. The blue glow in Death’s eyes gradually faded, and as the light died it sucked at her gaze so that it was dragged into the eye sockets and into the darkness beyond… …which went on and on, for ever. There was no word for it....
There was a crash from the direction of the kitchen, although it really was more of a crashendo - the long drawn out clatter that begins when a pile of plates begins to slip, continues when someone tries to grab at them, develops a desperate counter-...
Sounds travel through space long after their wave patterns have ceased to be detectable by the human ear: some cut right through the ionosphere and barrel on out into the cosmic heartland, while others bounce around, eventually being absorbed into th...
When it comes to the form the narrative will take, whether first person, third person, or Aunt Grace's cat, I usually find that the story tells me which voice it prefers, and that often changes as I go along. And in the end it really doesn't matter a...
Love ENDURES and works out ways of enduring the other stuff. As long as you can communicate you can work out issues, but good communication seems to be one of the weakest skills in human beings, so don't be afraid to try and try different ways of com...
I was just trying to demonstrate to the students of Rowland University that Rowland University was not infinite. It had taken me a long time to figure out what the problem was, but one day I realized that the students at Rowland University thought th...
That deepest thing, that recognition, that knowledge, that sense of kinship began the first time I saw you,and it is the same now - only a thousand times deeper and tenderer. I shall love you to eternity. I loved you long before we met in this flesh....
...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-...
Sorrow is God's plowshare that turns up and subsoils the depths of the soul, that it may yield richer harvests. If we had never fallen, or were in a glorified state, then the strong torrents of Divine joy would be the normal force to open up all our ...
We are all powerless to heal ourselves. Research shows that self-help statements have been found to be ineffective and even harmful by making some people with low self-esteem feel even worse about themselves in the long term. As a matter of fact, pos...
The alchemist was dazed and dumbfounded, as the true meaning of the magic was revealed: *The dead will rise from glade to glen and ancient will be young again*. The dead had, after all, risen. From dead and dry things there was growth, and new life e...
As someone who sends texts messages more or less non-stop, I enjoy one particular aspect of texting more than anything else: that it is possible to sit in a crowded railway carriage laboriously spelling out quite long words in full, and using an enor...
All of us know at least one drama queen or drama king. These people love to yell and make a scene when they’re offended. While all of that screaming might make them feel better in the short term, in the long term it does nothing for their careers o...
