baptism by whitewater Archives - The Writer's Workshop

Baptism by Whitewater: Running the Salmon River

One of the pleasures of my job includes doing “research” such as my recent trip down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. I had a wonderful trip organized by Solitude Rafting Company of Ketchum and wrote about it for a story in the latest issue of Mountain Gazette, with the link included below. As I tell the students in my Seattle writing classes, travel writing classes and online writing classes, such trips are full of the rich and significant detail that make for great scenes and great stories. Here’s a link to the story; please let me know what you think: Baptism by Whitewater: Running the Salmon River

There are only two or three human stories.

Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years.

Willa Cather

Writing a novel is a terrible experience.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

Flannery O’Connor

Literature is nothing but carpentry.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Just follow your hero.

First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!

Ray Bradbury

One false word, one extra word…

One false word, one extra word, and somebody's thinking about how they have to buy paper towels at the store.

Patricia Marx

Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you.

Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.

Barbara Kingsolver

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth.

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

Anne Lamott

…with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced…the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.

Ernest Hemingway

The difference between the right word and the almost right word…

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

Mark Twain

Get it down. Take chances.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.

William Faulkner

The forms of things unknown and the the poet’s pen…

And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.

William Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

Pleasure in a good novel…

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

Jane Austen

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.

V.S. Naipaul