Prompt Me - Birdies

As promised, I’m here with my picture prompt for the month of December.

Is that happy enough for you Catherine? Little birdies sitting on a string of Christmas balls. Are they someone’s pets, trained to sit there? Did they sneak in from outdoors to get in from the cold? Inquiring minds want to know.

The challenge is to come up with something creative inspired by the above picture - a story, a poem, or even a non-fiction article. I'd love to see what you come up with, and if you send it to me at carolrward(at)gmail(dot)com by Thursday, December 28, I'll post it here on the 29th. Please try to keep it to 1,000 words or less and if I get more pieces than will fit comfortably in a single blog post, I'll post them over a couple of days.

Even with the holidays coming up I’m sure you’ll be able to find the time to come up with something. Can’t wait to see it!

Quotable Quotes - February 27 through March 3

02-27
The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews.
~ William Faulkner

When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.
― Connie Willis

02-28
A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
~ William Faulkner

Writing- the profession in which you stare at a computer screen, stare out the window, type a few words, then curse repeatedly.
― Drew Goodman

03-01
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
~ Oscar Wilde

A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.
― Ian McEwan

03-02
The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
~ John Steinbeck

There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.
― Beatrix Potter

03-03
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.
~ Susan Sontag

I write
Not
For the sake of glory
Not
For the sake of fame
Not
For the sake of success
But for the sake of my soul
― Beth Nimmo

Quotable Quotes - February 20 through 24

02-20
Some critics will write ‘Maya Angelou is a natural writer’ – which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.
~ Maya Angelou

There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.
― Washington Irving

02-21
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
~ Anais Nin

I like the idea of coming up with a story that never existed before, but I don’t really want to be in charge. I don’t want to be famous. I guess I like the idea of sitting in the dark and knowing that I created the thing on screen, that it’s my story, but, like, no-one else has to know it was me. Does that make sense?
― Melissa Keil, Life in Outer Space

02-22
I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.
~ Helen Garner

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.
― Natalie Goldberg

02-23
However great a man’s natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.
Trust your demon.
― Roger Zelazny

02-24
Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t “try” to do things. You simply “must” do things.
~ Ray Bradbury

Why am I compelled to write?... Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger... To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispell the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit... Finally I write because I'm scared of writing, but I'm more scared of not writing.
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Quotable Quotes - February 13 through 17

02-13
At its root, perfectionism isn’t really about a deep love of being meticulous. It’s about fear. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of disappointing others. Fear of failure. Fear of success.
~ Michael Law

An admirable line of Pablo Neruda’s, “My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge… It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it.
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

02-14
If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
~  Vincent Van Gogh

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write.
― William Makepeace Thackeray

02-15
A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.
~ George R.R. Martin

I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.
― Terry Pratchett

02-16
The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.
~ Ernest Hermingway

There's nothing on Earth like really nailing the last line of a big book. You have 200 pages to tickle their fancy, and seven words to break their heart.
― Alex de Campi

02-17
The grandest seduction of all is the myth that DOING EVERYTHING BETTER gets us where we want to be. It gets us somewhere, certainly, but not anywhere worth being.
~ Shauna Niequist

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion.
― Dan Simmons

Quotable Quotes - February 6 through 10

02-06
Tradition wears a snowy beard, romance is always young.
~ John Greenleaf Whittier

...it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.
― Ernest Hemingway

02-07
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
~Ray Bradbury

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.
― Margaret Atwood

02-08
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
~Jorge Luis Borges

I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.
― Franz Kafka

02-09
Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer
~ J.R.R Tolkien

Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them. Writing is still the wildest thing I know.
― Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

02-10
Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order
~ Anne Wilson Schaef

A good writer should draw the reader in by starting in the middle of the story with a hook, then go back and fill in what happened before the hook. Once you have the reader hooked, you can write whatever you want as you slowly reel them in.
― Roland Smith

Quotable Quotes - January 30 through February 3

As mentioned in my previous post about shaking things up on the blog, I didn’t want to just ditch the quotes post, but picking out my two favourites of the week and interpreting/discussing them wasn’t exactly working the way I’d hoped it would. It was fun to do once in awhile, but like the poetry and flash fiction, once you get locked into a weekly thing mostly it just feels like a chore, and a chore I was struggling to find time for at that.

And yet, like I said, it seems a shame to waste the quotes that Jamie and I come up with for each other. Some of them are really good, worthy of getting written up for my cork board even. So I started saving the daily quotes in a document file, and each week I’ll post the previous week’s worth of quotes. This way you get a week’s worth of inspiration all in one post. And if you like, you can let me know which (if any) quotes you found helpful or inspirational in the comments.


Some authors write with a grave ink, of a dramatic pen dipped into their dark souls.
~Terri Guillemets

Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.
― Neil Gaiman


My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.
~Karl Kraus

I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.
― Ursula K. Le Guin


Caress your phrase tenderly: it will end by smiling at you.
~Anatole France

Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.
― Mary Gaitskill


“You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.”
“What mood is that?”
“Last-minute panic.”
~ Bill Watterson

Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.
― Margaret Mahy


Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
~E.L. Doctorow

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe