You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of empathy and emotional depth in storytelling.
In this quote, Charles Yu suggests that to tell a compelling story, one must not only develop emotional connections (symbolized by growing a heart) but also be ready to confront and deconstruct one's own emotions (smashing the first heart). This duality highlights the intricate and often painful process of storytelling, where personal experiences and emotional truths must be explored and expressed, often through a lens of vulnerability.
In practice
In a writing workshop, this quote can inspire participants to inject more emotion into their characters.
I had forgotten: this is what it feels like to live in time. The lurching forward, the sensation of falling of a cliff into darkness, and then landing abruptly, surprised, confused, and then starting the whole process again in the next moment, doing that over and over again, falling into each instant of time and then climbing back up only to repeat the process.
I am transcribing a book that I have, in a sense, not yet written, and in another sense, have always written, and in another sense, am currently writing, and in another sense, am always writing, and in another sense, will never write.
All of her heart, a meaningless phrase, but correct and precise, too. She used her heart to love him, not her head, and not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or any other vehicle or object or device people use to deliver love or love-like things.
Enjoy the elastic present, which can accommodate as little or as much as you want to put in there. Stretch it out, live inside of it.
Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.
There is more beauty than our eyes can bear, precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.
Truly great actors carry their characters in silence with them. They communicate without words the relationships that predate the movie.
My dread is for my show to be a nostalgia act. So the key to it is how do we keep it fresh?
I like to look at pictures, all kinds. And all those things you absorb come out subconsciously one way or another. You'll be taking photographs and suddenly know that you have resources from having looked at a lot of them before. There is no way you can avoid this. But this kind of subconscious influence is good, and it certainly can work for one. In fact, the more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.
I don't like to write rhetorically or get on a soapbox. I try to make the stuff multi-layered, so that it always has a life outside its social context. I don't believe that you can tell people anything; you can only draw them in.
It's a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours. To translate it is even more maddening.
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