Annie Q Syed

Preface to Nectar of the Ordinary stories.

I am not even sure if anyone besides the people to whom these stories belong will read what follows in the collection. Maybe even they won’t.  My sentences together serve as a frame to hold a snap shot of their element’s thumbprint on our big blue marble.  A statement persistently orbits my peripheral consciousness as I begin to write. Over a decade ago, more years than I want to count specifically, a Literature professor in college tirelessly told the students in his class, every time staring directly at me (perhaps unintentionally each time), that all writers have an audience in mind and most importantly they write because they must. As I already stated, I don’t have any particular audience in mind.  However, I know with more certainty than I have yet to know anything else that I must place these stories on a tangible medium instead of thought-provoking conversations over dinner and drinks with other soul-diggers that dissipate ever too quickly, leaving the longing for another fix to find our way around our selves. A dim flicker shines through the fractured spaces in these living apparitions’ tales, serving as a guide to tread upon expansive realms deep within ourselves where we are afraid to venture alone.

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…that resonate deeply with my process.

“I don’t believe in it (writer’s block). All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?” ~ Oscar Wilde

“What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don’t read the books.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

“Don’t ask a writer what [s]he’s working on.  It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.” ~ Amy Lowell

“I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning and took out a comma.  In the afternoon, I put it back in.” ~ Mark Twain

“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckle heads.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“There’s only one difference between published and unpublished writers and it is this – the first group see their work in print on the shelves of Waterstone’s or Tesco or online at Amazon; the second group are yet to have physical evidence of the hours, weeks, years spent fashioning words into their patterns.  You are already a writer.” ~ E. M. Forester

“To me the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

“When you live and work on your own, as I do, writing takes a long time. You can keep producing shit and you’re always wondering whether you should stop. I’m so glad I had friends who told me to keep going.” ~ Isaac Asimov

“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you’ve got something to say.” ~ Willa Cather

“Writing is more than anything else a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.” ~ Salman Rushdie

“I have no problem with chick lit.  I love Bridget Jones’ Diary, it’s just great. It’s all the muck in the middle I mind.  I hate anything that’s middle brow.  Let us have art and let us have entertainment.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.” ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“As regards plot I find real life no help at all.  Real life seems to have no plots.  And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.” ~ Francis Bacon

Saying you want to write the truth is like saying you want to take a picture of infinity. All truths are distorted when captured. ~ a.q.s.