Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.
Interpretation
Writing captures experiences and reflections after inspiration fades.
This quote by John Burroughs emphasizes that writing is not just a record of events as they happen, but rather a process that occurs after the initial excitement of inspiration has passed. It likens writing to fishing, where one collects insights that are often left behind in the more challenging moments of life, suggesting that true reflection and expression come from revisiting those moments with clarity and depth.
In practice
In a workshop for aspiring authors, I quoted Burroughs to illustrate how to harness their past experiences in their writing.
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth.
Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation to nature because he is freer and his mind more at leisure.
Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible.
As authors, most - most authors, our art is portraying the human condition. Trying to show you what it's like to be somebody else, trying to make you feel for somebody else. That means you have to have a high degree of empathy.
Pixar is not about computers, it's about people.
people see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it's great. an Academy Award means that you don't stink quite as much as your cousin.
The art of healing is like an unroofed temple, uncovered at the top and cracked at the foundation.
The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their monuments or from their domestic relics.
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