“Beginnings, Middles and Ends: How to get your stories off to a roaring start, keep them tight and crisp throughout, and end them with a wallop”, by Nancy Kress

Pg. 2

Learning about writing won’t help you write better unless you actually apply what you learn to a story in progress — just as learning about the ideal golf swing won’t improve your score unless you actually practice on the links. There’s no substitute for practice. The Mariana Trench doesn’t get crossed by discussing it.

Nor will this book help you improve the quality of the story in your head. That vision comes from everything about you: your experiences, your imagination, your beliefs about the world, your powers of perception, your interests, your sophistication, your previous reading, your soul. Vision, sometimes called talent, is not a teachable attribute.

What is teachable, and what this book can help you with, is craft. Craft is the process of getting the story in your head onto the page in a form that readers can follow, and remain interested in, and enjoy.

“The Acorn People”, by Ron Jones

Pg. 62

Why can’t life be like this? Human beings in all their magnificence. Working to find that moment of pride. That one second of excellence at being alive. Hearing our singular voice held in harmony by the voices of those we love. The feeling of belonging not just to oneself but to the entire universe.

“Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, by Anne Lamott

Pg. 6-7

You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or 10 every night. You put the piece of paper in a typewriter, or you turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind — a scene, a locale, a character, whatever — and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind. The other voices are banshees and drunken monkeys. They are the voices of anxiety, judgment, doom, guilt. Also, severe hypochondria. There may be a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk. There is a vague pain at the base of your neck. It crosses your mind that you have meningitis. Then the phone rings and you look up at the ceiling with fury, summon every ounce of noblesse oblige, and answer the call politely, with maybe just the merest hint of irritation. The caller asks if you’re working, and you say yeah, because you are.

Yet somehow in the face of all this, you clear a space for the writing voice, hacking away at the others with machetes, and you begin to compose sentences. You begin to string words together like beads to tell a story.

“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”, by J.K. Rowling

Pg. 51

He placed his empty glass on a small table beside his chair, but before he could do anything else, Uncle Vernon shouted, “Will you get these ruddy things off us?”

Harry looked around; all three of the Dursleys were cowering with their arms over their heads as their glasses bounced up and down on their skulls, their contents flying everywhere.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Dumbledore politely, and he raised his wand again. All three glasses vanished. “But it would have been better manners to drink it, you know.”

“Why So Slow?, The Advancement of Women”, by Virginia Valian

Pg. 180

Since the unrealistic nature of white men’s expectations has not been acknowledged,  and since the implications of gender and race schemas have not been appreciated, many white men are unable to understand or come to terms with their failures. They perceive that they are losing out to some women and minority men, but they cannot see the loss as justified because they are in the grip of race and gender schemas portraying non-whites and women as professionally inferior to white men. For many white men, losing out to a minority person or a woman engenders shame and anger and also compromises their masculine identity. some then invoke the explanation of “reverse discrimination” to claim that those were less able and qualified receive unfair advantages…

Gender schemas do men a disservice. They prevent men from being realistic and objective and require men to be successful in order to maintain an essential part of their self-concept — their masculine identity. They lead men to think that they are more capable than they are and encourage them to have overly high aspirations.

Pg. 183

To the extent that women see success as due to random or uncontrollable factors, they will profit from it less. Seeing success in those terms is particularly disadvantageous because it leaves women with nothing to analyze, nothing to learn from success. People cannot build on an experience they attribute to luck. To benefit cognitively from a success and increase the chances for the next one, a person must figure out what was causally relevant. Successes are linked to each other. Each success teaches a lesson that can be used to advantage for the next attempt. There is a causal chain from one success to another, even if that chain is harder for women to construct.

I have said that it is rational for women to attribute more of a role to luck than men do, because cause-and-effect relations hold less strongly in their world. But it is even more rational for women to understand how the inaccurate evaluations of their success weekend the causal chain between ability and success. That understanding will, in turn, allow women to perform a more sophisticated analysis of their situation and develop a more sophisticated strategy to deal with it. Perhaps the single most important factor in success is flexible perseverance — “flexible” because simply doing more work in the same way may not be enough. Long-term success requires having a strategy and refining it in the light of short-term successes and failures.

“Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out”, edited by Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaahumanu

Pg. 306

Why is the possibility of “passing” so insistently viewed as a great privilege… and not understood as a terrible degradation and denial?

– Evelyn Torton Beck, Nice Jewish Girls

…

pg. 320

When I share
my racial and cultural roots
people scoff
“you can’t be!”
“you’re kidding!”
“no you’re not!”
then proceed to tell me
then proceed to define me
then proceed to invalidate
what is really real for me.

What gives anyone
the right
to tell me who and what I am?

I never want to hear
that I don’t look Hawaiian
that I don’t look Japanese
that I’m lucky I don’t look my age
that I can’t be, that I couldn’t be
Why make such a big deal about it?
Why is it so important?

I never want to hear
that I am not a bisexual
that there is no such thing
that if I haven’t been with a man for a while,
I should call myself a lesbian
that I am hurting lesbians
that I am confusing
an already confusing situation for heterosexual society

Why make such a fuss?
Why don’t I just keep it quiet?
Why is it so important?

Don’t tell me who I am
Don’t tell me what my experience is or has been
Don’t tell me my personal is not political
Don’t ask me why it is important or what’s the big deal

I won’t be silenced
I will make a fuss
and I will tell you why it is so important…

I claim it all and have no shame for it is the truth.

“Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics”, by Jennifer Baumgardner

Pg. 225

For me, this fight for inclusion is linked to feminism. Inclusion is one of the reasons I am a feminist and one of the ways I define equality. Women have the right and responsibility to go where men go, be it to strip clubs, to war, to work, or to the bank. Men have those same rights and responsibilities with regard to women’s spaces. When I apply this desire to trump exclusion to sexuality, it means that gay people deserve to get married and have kids and receive social approbation for their relationships, just like straight people. Moreover, straight people deserve what gay people tend to have: the privilege of equality in their relationships and freedom from rigid gender roles.

“Oneness: Great Principles Shared By All Religions”, be Jeffrey Moses

Pg. 31

Whenever there is tension or fighting between individuals, groups, or nations, it means that a time of mutual understanding has been lost, and channels of communication have not been used.

Love is a unifying force. It radiates outward to resolve differences between people and nations. It is not that these unique qualities dissolve and are lost, but that they are integrated into a greater whole in which they are made more useful and beautiful.

Love conquers before there is fighting. Even if channels of communication have broken down and fighting breaks out, the underlying attitude should still be one of love and unification by love.

“Lifting the White Veil: An Exploration of White American Culture in a Multiracial Context”, by Jeff Hitchcock

Pg. 201

The main point of this book is that we who are white Americans should be a little more aware of our race and our culture, that is to say, our whiteness. We need to understand how we presently fit within the racial structure of the United States. When Robert Terry, in 1981, said, “To be white in America is not to have to think about it,” he was describing a situation as it was, not as he thought he should be. We do have to think about it. True, even today many white people can blissfully ignore their racial and cultural background and identity. But as the country becomes increasingly multiracial in composition, the space in which we can wear racial blinders is diminishing.