GREENWICH PEN WOMEN - Arts, Letters, Music, Creativity

                       “Make people believe in your story first and foremost.”  ~~ Gabriel Garcia

  Inside of rummaging through your pocketbook to find your COVID vaccination card   and   your photo ID. take a picture of them together on your smart-phone. This way you save time and most times you know where your cell phone is.

  “Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer --- how happy, however tragic—is ever wasted.”    ~~ P.D. James

  “Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader or any reader. He/she might exist but is reading someone else.” ~~ Carol Joyce Oates

  “ Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.” ~~ Margaret Atwood

                           “ Write slowly and by hand only about subjects that interest you.”   ~~ Annie Proulx

  “Don't romanticize your “vocation." You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no “writer's lifestyle." All that matters is what you leave on the page.”   ~~ Zadie Smith

  “The first sentence can be written only after the last sentence has been written. FIRST DRAFTS ARE HELL. FINAL DRAFTS, PARADISE.”   ~~ Joyce Carol Oates

                              "Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.”  — Henri Matisse

  May 2021: “Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they’ll know it too.”   ~~ Esther Freud

  “Don’t panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends’ embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however has always got me there in the end.  . .”  ~~ Sarah Waters

Your take-out food containers can be recycled as handy storage places for your tubes of paint. Label each container have its own color range, i.e., reds, greens, etc.

When buying a new tube of paint: Open the tube and lubricate the grooves by putting a little petroleum jelly on them. Twist cap back and forth a couple of times. No more sticking caps.

  “In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.”  ~~ Rose Tremain

  “You have to get to a very quiet place inside yourself. And that doesn’t mean that you can’t have noise outside. I know some people who put jazz on, loudly, to write. I think each writer has her or his secret path to the muse.”   ~ ~ Maya Angelou

  “Be your own artist, and always be confident in what you’re doing. If you’re not going to be confident, you might as well not be doing it.”    ~ ~ Aretha Franklin

  Always carry a notebook. and I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.   ~~ Will Self

  “If everything was perfect, you would never learn and you would never grow.” ~~ Beyoncé

If you are stuck when writing, skip ahead to a scene you really WANT to write. No one is going to tell you off for not writing in chronological order - well, except for your inner critic, but we all have to work on silencing that voice when we're writing. Writing a scene you're excited about usually helps resolve writer's block. The important thing is to keep writing! Sarah Darer Littman

Make sure your sketchbook has a hard cover so you can rest it on your lap. Photo by @plqml // felipe pelaquim on Unsplash