Thoughts As I Go #4: Love and Detail

Paper Coach : Teach Yourself to Write (A Fiction Writing Course)

I want to share a quotation from Julia Cameron's The Right to Write. If you haven't gathered it already, I like this book, what it says, and what I feel it doing to my head.

Here's the quotation:

"It is a great paradox that the more personal, focused, and specific your writing becomes, the more universally it communicates...specificity is freedom."
- Julia Cameron, The Right to Write

This is the conclusion of a discussion speaking to the difference between technical skill and profound emotional force. These two things (skill and force) are independent. Obviously, the best art happens when skill and force are both at their highest peak. But skill can be low, emotional force high, and we might prefer that work over a piece where skill is high but emotional force only middling.

I picture two overlapping sine waves. The intersection between skill and force denoting any given work. But that's just me.