You know. Reading is important. Because I’m like always trying to make every line I write this groundbreaking mindfucking art but like. A book is 90% just saying what happened. “I hugged him around the waist.” “The chair was brown and overstuffed.” “I woke up alone.” Etc etc. Like normal ass lines. I just keep comparing my boring, necessary to set a scene lines, with famous authors’ absolute best lines and like…. every line doesn’t have to shatter the earth. Sometimes someone just sits in a chair and the lines that wreck you come later, one at a time, here and there. It’s alright.
This is super common and I wish we were taught when we begin to write that those quoted lines are also in a sea of the same sort of setup we obsess over not being ‘good enough’. I saw multiple people drop out of writing courses over this in college. Sure, sometimes you need a better way to describe something prevalent or to pinpoint an emotion, but if EVERYTHING was written in that sort of tone for a whole book it would prove utterly exhausting to read.
Also, if every single line in the book was hard-hitting and mindblowing, then it wouldn’t be memorable because it would be drowned out.
sam sifton, from the nyt “what to cook right now” newsletter
It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it … and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied … and it is all one.
MFK Fisher
Food transgresses the ‘boundaries’ between here and there, us and them, me and you, until we are all just bundles of matter, eating and being eaten. When we feed each other, we give a bit of ourselves to form the fabric of someone else. This is the glue that binds us.
