“The most important and hardest thing for any writer to learn is the discipline of sitting down and writing even when you have to spend three days writing bad stuff before the fourth day, when you write something better. If you’ve been away from what you’ve been working on even for a day and a half, you have to put in those three days of bad writing to get to the fourth, or you lose the thread, you lose the rhythm. When you are a young writer, those three days are so unpleasant that you tend to think, ‘I’ll go away until the mood strikes me.’ Well, you’re out of the mood because you’re not sitting there, because you haven’t had that period of trying to push through till the fourth day when the rhythm comes.” —Joan Didion Another great post about writing and life courtesy of the excellent, apoetreflects.

“The most important and hardest thing for any writer to learn is the discipline of sitting down and writing even when you have to spend three days writing bad stuff before the fourth day, when you write something better. If you’ve been away from what you’ve been working on even for a day and a half, you have to put in those three days of bad writing to get to the fourth, or you lose the thread, you lose the rhythm. When you are a young writer, those three days are so unpleasant that you tend to think, ‘I’ll go away until the mood strikes me.’ Well, you’re out of the mood because you’re not sitting there, because you haven’t had that period of trying to push through till the fourth day when the rhythm comes.”

—Joan Didion

Another great post about writing and life courtesy of the excellent, apoetreflects.

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.
Joan Didion (from Whiskey River)
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
Joan Didion (via beelockwood) (via themagiclantern)

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.

— Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook

(via: ratak-monodosico & quinnisarose)

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while.
Joan Didion (Whiskey River)