“I hardly know how to write about myself. Any style you pick seems to unpick itself before a paragraph is done. I will just go for it, I think to myself, I’ll hold out my hands and say, c’est moi, get used to it. I’ll trust the reader. This is what I recommend to people who ask me how to get published. Trust your reader, stop spoon-feeding your reader, stop patronising your reader, give your reader credit for being as smart as you at least, and stop being so bloody beguiling: you in the back row, will you turn off that charm! Plain words on plain paper.”
– Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost
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“We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.”
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden
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The best way to discover who you are is to write it out.
It’s cheaper than shopping for new outfits every day.
If I write without really thinking about what I will say, it feels… better. Better than straining for the right word or a clever turn of phrase.
I like to write like I am having a chat. We don’t make the other person wait for us to rummage through our bag of tricks when talking in person.
I won’t make you wait.
I’ve almost finished.
I am not hiding behind an abstraction. No theories to hide behind.
Just trying to be myself.
But who is that?
Good question.
I’ll have to get back to you on that one.
Conversations With Quotations 