„Volume is key: this means that it’s important to work a lot. But editing is also critical: this means that it’s just as important to realize that most of what we create (whether photographs or paragraphs) are going to be seriously deficient and will need tremendous revision (or a complete restart). It’s all a big process, and the hardest part is getting used to plugging away, regardless of the bad paragraphs, false starts, out of focus images, poorly conceived ideas, or weak arguments. Brett Weston, one of my absolute favorite photographers, once said that photography is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent sheer, brutal drudgery. I think the same applies to writing. Part of the difficulty is learning how to weather the bad streaks and lame attempts while finding ways to grab hold of the key ideas, discoveries, and moments of inspiration long enough to pin them down.“ [#]
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„I went off to Africa for a year and a half to begin to get my field work started, which I have been doing ever since for twenty-five years and it was fairly isolated site, where a lot of the time I was by myself. I would go 8 to 10 hours a day without speaking to anyone, I would get a mail drop about once every two weeks or so, there was no electricity, there was no radio, there was no anything, and I suddenly got unbelievably, frantically dependent on mail. So as a result you wind up sending letters to every human that you have known in your life in hopes that they would write back to you. So what would happen is, all I could afford at the time were like these one-page aerogram things that you could sort of get in these big stacks, and something vaguely interesting would happen every couple of days or so. So you would write to somebody about it, and then you would write to the next person about it, and you would realize that before the end of the day, you had just written 25 versions of it, each of which was a page and a half long. And I think somehow the process that year, sort of the writing just got very intertwined with sort of all of the more emotional issues, and there was definitely a shift there.“ [#]
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„Writers sit at their desks for hours, wrestling with ideas. They ask questions, talk with other smart people over drinks or dinner, go on long walks. And then write a whole bunch more. Don’t worry that what you write is not very good and isn’t immediately usable. You get ideas when you write; you don’t just write down ideas.“ [#]
