Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.
Alex HaleyRead
That's what happens with writing. Ingredients bubble and cook. Material becomes substance.
Interpretation
Writing transforms raw ideas into meaningful content through a process of development.
In this quote, Alex Haley emphasizes the creative process involved in writing, comparing it to cooking where various ingredients blend and transform into a cohesive dish. It suggests that just as raw ingredients require time and careful attention to become a gourmet meal, so too do words and ideas need to simmer in a writer's mind before they transform into polished, impactful writing.
In practice
A writer's workshop could use this quote to discuss the importance of allowing ideas to mature.
Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.
Tying the little folks with the older folks is a great and powerful tool to preserve and to protect the family and the individual.
I think one of the most fascinating things you can do after you learn about your own people is to study something about the history and culture of other people.
In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.
Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.
I certainly wasn't seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me, asking questions. One was, "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books.
I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.
I work for ABC. If the thing that ABC is paying me for is storytelling - not to make sure that a costume is exactly right or all those other things - then it is up to me to find the most creative space possible so that that function of my job can happen.
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.
I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.
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