all the little live things

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.

—Anais Nin

As I’ve said many times before, Anais Nin is the author that made me start writing myself. I’m fascinated by her relentless, fearless exploration of herself. She was a tender, flawed, fascinating woman. She left behind tender, flawed, fascinating work. (via clementinevonradics)

You think I’ll understand your sadness because I live inside my own.

—Clementine von Radics (via youstonefox)

(via clementinevonradics)

As a woman, people are going to ask you to write the kind of insipid shit they would never in a million fucking years ask a man to write. They’re going to tell you to make it lovable, to take harsh opinions out of your heroine’s head, to cut your pissy first-person essay off at the kneecaps. They’re going to run out and publish a million and one disconnected, crappy Deep Thoughts by some self-proclaimed boy wonder, but they’re going to read your perfectly delightful work and tell you that it’ll be just great, as long as you only include the stuff on the trials and tribulations of being a mom (Argh! Teehee!) or being a girl (Oh noes! Teehee!) or being a woman (Growl! Just kidding! Teehee!). They’re going to ask you to write about your recent weight gain, or your recent divorce, or your recent (insert humiliating story here), and what lessons you’ve learned from it. They’re going to want you to come up with a fucking moral to your story. Because you’re a lady, you don’t have the option of stomping around in a funk. Because you are a woman, and you feel feelings, you must draw some giant, oversimplified conclusion. You must have blandly down-to-earth protagonists, you must have lovable mommies hugging lost kittens, you must have rainbows and sunbeams spewing out of your ass. They’re going to coach you into writing something you’re not entirely sure about, something you would never in a million fucking years read yourself (if you had free will, which it sometimes seems like you don’t), and they’re going to tell you it’s pure genius. And even though you still might see your piece or essay or snippet of prose as “literary,” they’re going to stick an incendiary headline on it (“Help! I Ate My Own Vagina!”) and it’s going to be an internet sensation, and you’re going to feel Bad with a capital B about it.

—Preach, Heather Havrilesky. This is bleak but #letsbereal, several of these things have happened to me already in my admittedly short career as a freelance writer. (via annfriedman)