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Quote by Mary J. Miller

“I want to be able to discuss craft but I also want to teach writers to trust their instincts and learn to listen to themselves above all others.”

Quote by Mary J. Miller

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Mary J. Miller is an individual whose profession and category are unknown. Detailed information about her is limited. more

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“To be quite honest, along with thinking and such when it comes to writing, I'm not into words like "theory." I'm a PhD dropout. No matter how many twenty-five-page papers I wrote, I never felt like I was saying much. I didn't feel like the writer of the book, whose work I was analyzing, would have been impressed. It didn't matter how much time or effort I put in.”

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“"There is no analysis here," the most brutal of them wrote. Now I wonder if my papers lacked critical thought, or if it was really more about my inability/refusal to write in the convoluted style that they wanted me to. I remember the initial shock upon reading my peers' papers. I seriously could not understand them, and I couldn't understand why the writing had to be so unclear in order to be considered smart.”

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“I think training your instinct comes from writing and reading. There's no big secret. And reading slush helps, as well; I'd recommend everyone edit a literary magazine at some point. It's time-consuming, but there's a lot to learn from other writers who are also learning. The patterns (twelve stories about whales in this batch?) are also interesting.”

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“I've learned a lot about language from reading slush. You can immediately tell if a writer is in control of the narrative. This writer will avoid using too many words like "possibly," "probably," "maybe," "perhaps," etc. He/she will avoid using clichés, as well as a lot of metaphors, and won't take four sentences to say what they could in one (or write a great sentence and follow it up with a bunch of stuff that just weakens it).”

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“I've learned so much from my professors and have been fortunate to have had so many good ones, including Frederick and Steven Barthelme, Edward Carey, Jim Magnuson, and Elizabeth McCracken.”

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“Some of the things I liked in my years as a student in workshops: the occasional in-class prompt; discussions about what it means to be a writer in the world; professors who are brutally honest and encouraging at the same time (this is a tough one).”

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“I also liked it when professors assigned us stories that they love. In general, I liked workshops more when they were more than just a workshop, when the professor took the time to actually guide us as young writers and teach us things it took them a long time to figure out on their own. I could probably write ten pages on this question.”

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“I'd heard that Lenny Bruce used a lot of profanity and obscenities in his act, and I was curious.”

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“As far as I remember, there was no actual lyric written to that.At the very beginning of "Fiddler on the Roof," there's a violin solo, an unaccompanied violin solo.”

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