From my fiction workshop days; prompts; encouragement & some gorgeous prose

PROMPTS FOR SAT., AUG 13: 1)  THINK OF SOMEONE WITH WHOM YOU PARTED W/ UNRESOLVED ISSUES; NOW IMAGINE SEEING THEM 15 YEARS LATER.  2) 2 PEOPLE WAITING AT THE MTA LOST & FOUND, BOTH HAVING LOST SOMETHING  (MY SELF-ESTEEM...?)

RE: Proust's The Sweet Cheat Gone:

If I were the translator, I would take this sentence:

"And with each of my actions, even the most trivial, since they had all been steeped before in the blissful atmosphere which was Albertine's presence, I was obliged in turn, with a fresh expenditure of energy, with the same grief, to begin again the apprenticeship of separation."

And, so as to better follow, turn it into this:

"And with each of my actions (even the most trivial, since they had all been steeped before in the blissful atmosphere which was Albertine's presence), I was obliged in turn -- with a fresh expenditure of energy, with the same grief -- to begin again the apprenticeship of separation."

Because how brilliant is that, "the apprenticeship of separation"?  How awful would it be for that particular phrase to be lost because the reader's ability to concentrate had been exhausted by not one, but four, dense digressions!

PROUST RULES!
(And you can tell him I said so...)

 'Telling someone we will try is like wanting approval for something we have no intention of doing.' 
(So Yoda was channeling Proust!)

Any inspiration is good inspiration -- don't feel the need to wait, either. I've always found that I feel more creative/inspired/happy to write at a particular time of day (for me both early in the morning and late at night), & if you try to make it a routine, your psyche begins to work with you. Even if you only sit and re-read what you've done, until your work and its prose has soaked into your bones, you'll find that ideas for both original stuff and rewrites will spontaneously appear -- but you do have to keep thinking about it. And you don't need to wait for me or any other editor to do it, either. Go for it! Decide that this book is gonna be one solid thing that you did and did well -- by which I mean, did to the absolute best of your ability, so that whenever you re-read it you think yup, that's what I meant, and I like how I said it. Any time you have a slight sense of disappointment, or find yourself mentally explaining things to imaginary readers, that's when you have to sit down and change it. And once you've managed to do that, change a couple things for the better, or best, then your confidence increases that you can, and more importantly, WILL be able to do that throughout, until you're completely satisfied. There is no feeling like it, trust me. It nourishes and sustains me, all the time. I have my 3 books stacked up & anytime I pick one of them up and leaf through it I think this is good. James Salter was right when he said 'Kris, nothing matters but the writing. Everything else falls away."

Here's a couple pieces from a couple different novels with very different voices that I hope will inspire you:

"...we're from Oakland. And Oakland builds quality. Folks who creep but don't crawl. Melt down but don't vaporize. I move around -- Oakland, anyway. So I know the Bay Area creates righteous people who deal with splendor and sting, sham and certainty, gray velvet dog and lemon-glass sunshine -- all while just getting from Point A to Point B." -- Danyel Smith, from More Like Wrestling.

From The More I Owe You, by Michael Sledge, re Elizabeth Bishop:

"Elizabeth began to wonder at her failure of passion for her own work.  Poetry, when she was young, had seemed to be an open gate into the most lush of landscapes, as lush as that through which they were traveling now; nothing else had compared to the excitement of discovering her growing powers or the reaches of her own imagination.  Somehow, that had changed.  Poetry had used her up. It had left her desiccated.  She'd dedicated her entire adult life to the craft of writing, and yet even with the praise she'd received, the admiration of a number of people she herself had long admired, and the envy of a handful of others, it had given so little back, even less in times of real need.  It was like indentured servitude --or no, like faith in some particularly dry, ascetic, self-castigating religious sect.  The reward lay in the devotion itself.  It did not relieve her of her thirst."