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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Know your craft...purple prose

In literary criticism, purple prose is prose text that is so extravagant, ornate, or flowery as to break the flow and draw excessive attention to itself.

Purple prose is characterized by the excessive use of adjectives, adverbs, and metaphors. When it is limited to certain passages, they may be termed purple patches or purple passages, standing out from the rest of the work.


Purple prose is criticized for desaturating the meaning in an author's text by overusing melodramatic and fanciful descriptions. As there is no precise rule or absolute definition of what constitutes purple prose, deciding if a text, passage, or complete work has fallen victim is a somewhat subjective decision. According to Paul West, "It takes a certain amount of sass to speak up for prose that's rich, succulent and full of novelty. Purple is immoral, undemocratic and insincere; at best artsy, at worst the exterminating angel of depravity."


Wow...great sentence

“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. 

Your days are your sonnets.”


— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890.




A thesaurus



Irish soul, William Butler Yeats


Matsuo Basho

REAL POETRY, IS TO LEAD A BEAUTIFUL LIFE. TO LIVE POETRY IS BETTER THAN TO WRITE IT.




The Effortless Effort of Creativity: Jane Hirshfield on Storytelling, the Art of Concentration, and Difficulty as a Consecrating Force of Creative Attention



“In the wholeheartedness of concentration, world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.”


The Continuous Thread of Revelation: Eudora Welty on Writing, Time, and Embracing the Nonlinearity of How We Become Who We Are



“Greater than scene… is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.”

The Only Story in the World: John Steinbeck on Kindness, Good and Evil, the Wellspring of Good Writing



“Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.”


T.S. Eliot on Writing: His Warm and Wry Letter of Advice to a Sixteen-Year-Old Girl Aspiring to Become a Writer



“Don’t write at first for anyone but yourself.”

Jennifer Egan on Writing, the Trap of Approval, and the Most Important Discipline for Aspiring Writers



“You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly… Accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.”



Jeanette Winterson’s 10 Tips on Writing




“Turn up for work. Discipline allows for creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.”


Rachel Carson on Writing and the Loneliness of Creative Work



“If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in… you will interest other people.”


Ursula K. Le Guin on Art, Storytelling, and the Power of Language to Transform and Redeem



“One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience… Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.”


I write



“I write for a species of man that does not yet exist: the masters of the earth.” F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Image result for F. Nietzsche

And he should know, having shot himself and all

WORRY A LITTLE BIT EVERY DAY AND IN A LIFETIME YOU WILL LOSE A COUPLE OF YEARS. IF SOMETHING IS WRONG, FIX IT IF YOU CAN. BUT TRAIN YOURSELF NOT TO WORRY: WORRY NEVER FIXES ANYTHING.- Ernest Hemingway

Richard Brautigan Poem: A Boat


 BY RICHARD BRAUTIGAN


O beautiful
was the werewolf  
in his evil forest.  
We took him
to the carnival  
and he started  
  crying
when he saw
the Ferris wheel.  
Electric
green and red tears  
flowed down
his furry cheeks.  
He looked
like a boat

out on the dark water

Well done !