I do feel that if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story.
Interpretation
Writing good sentences sequentially leads to the creation of a compelling story.
This quote by Amy Hempel highlights the fundamental process of storytelling, emphasizing that quality writing is built step by step. Each well-crafted sentence contributes to the overall narrative, suggesting that storytelling is an art that requires patience and dedication to develop over time.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a writing workshop to encourage budding authors.
Then the children went to bed, or at least went upstairs, and the men joined the women for a cigarette on the porch, absently picking ticks engorged like grapes off the sleeping dogs. And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women's cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought stay.
I sleep with a glass of water on the nightstand so I can see by its level if the coastal earth is trembling or if the shaking is still me.
if it's true your life flashes past your eyes before you die, then it is also the truth that your life rushes forth when you are ready to start to truly be alive.
Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul
The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.
I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.
You don't merely give over your creativity to making a film - you give over your life! In theatre, by contrast, you live these two rather strange lives simultaneously; you have no option but to confront the mould on last night's washing-up.
I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.
The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-swinging, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence - putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply - if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.