Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.
Stephen KingRead
Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.
Interpretation
Recognizing ideas when they present themselves is more important than actively searching for them.
This quote by Stephen King emphasizes the importance of awareness and attentiveness in the creative process. Rather than solely focusing on the quest for new ideas, one should be open and perceptive to the ideas that naturally arise in everyday life. It suggests that inspiration often comes from unexpected places and that being receptive can lead to creativity and innovation.
In practice
During a motivational speech about creative processes in a workshop.
Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.
Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
Hairstyles change, and skirt lengths, and slang, but high school administrations? Never.
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
That's the day's business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn't matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you're alone. He seemed to have put in as many miles in his brain as he had with his feet. The thoughts kept coming and there was no way to deny them.
Late last night and the night before, tommyknockers, tommyknockers knocking on my door. I wanna go out, don't know if I can 'cuz I'm so afraid of the tommyknocker man.
Lucidity of speech is unquestionably one of the surest tests of mental precision...In my experience a confused talker is never a clear thinker.
Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn't because we didn't have good politicians; we had some really good politicians. But then we started inventing - electricity, steam engines, microprocessors, understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are important - I'm not taking anything away from that - but innovation is the real driver of progress.
The world is afflicted by death and decay. But the wise do not grieve, having realized the nature of the world.
When men are inhuman, take care not to feel towards them as they do towards other humans.
People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.
I have lived a long time, and one thing I have come to see is that one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person's heart
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