A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.
Katherine Anne PorterRead
Most people won't realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
Interpretation
Writing is a skill that requires practice and learning over time.
Katherine Anne Porter's quote emphasizes that writing is not just a natural talent but a craft that can be honed through dedicated practice and study. Just like any other profession, aspiring writers should approach it with the mindset of an apprentice, recognizing the need for continuous learning and improvement to master the art of writing.
In practice
In a writing workshop, you could use this quote to encourage participants to embrace the learning process.
A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.
Writing, in any sense that matters, cannot be taught. It can only be learned by each separate one of us in his own way, by the use of his own powers of imagination and perception, the ability to learn the lessons he has set for himself.
You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.
They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.
Miracles are instantaneous, they cannot be summoned, but come of themselves, usually at unlikely moments and to those who least expect them.
Now and again thousands of memories _x000D_ converge, harmonize, _x000D_ arrange themselves around a central idea _x000D_ in a coherent form, _x000D_ and I write a story.
...the source of all great mathematics is the special case, the concrete example. It is frequent in mathematics that every instance of a concept of seemingly generality is, in essence, the same as a small and concrete special case.
In general, higher education does not know how to speak for its interests. It offers a stance that is defensive, cowardly and likely to be ineffective.
Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher.
It is this simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences-makes them, as the poets tell us, 'charm the crowd's ears more finely.' Educated men lay down broad general principles; uneducated men argue from common knowledge and draw obvious conclusions.
The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust: to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength.
Think about being a teenager and feeling like school is just about taking tests you may or may not be interested in, after which someone will judge whether or not you're smart. No one's going to be inspired by that.
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