“I've been told by people who write historical novels that you just sort of write the emotional truth first, the story at the core, and then you go back and research it at the end.” PeopleWritingFirstsEndsStoriesNovelEmotionalResearchHistoricalCoreHistorical Novels Author:Jami Attenberg
“Both Kant and Fichte thought of traditions of revealed religion as ways of symbolically (that is, with aesthetic emotional power) thinking about our moral condition. Both thought that religion would become more and not less powerful, emotionally and morally, if the claims of scriptures and religious teachings were taken symbolically rather than literally (whatever 'literally' might mean in the case of claims that are either nonsensical or outdated or historically unsupportable if taken as metaphysical or historical assertions).” IfsThinkingWayMeanMightReligiousPowerfulMoralCasesTakenTeachingConditionsEmotionalTraditionClaimsHistoricalScriptureAestheticMetaphysicalAssertionOutdatedNonsensicalEmotional Power Author:Allen W. Wood
“I soon found I could not talk about that in a vacuum without understanding the historical, cultural, political context, and giving it some legacy and some roots, and so then it just started to have tentacles that just spread out in all these places, and already a vicious project became pretty overwhelming in scope, and so it was a lot of diligent, day-to-day fighting with the footage, trying to get it down to a place where it was manageable and emotional.” GivingTryingPoliticalFightingFoundUnderstandingEmotionalProjectsRootsHistoricalSpreadLegacyOverwhelmingDay To DayViciousScopeVacuumsDiligentManageableTentacles Author:Ava DuVernay
“There was one sequence of days [making Lincoln in the Bardo] when I had halfway decided to use the historical nuggets, but I wasn't quite sure it would work. I'd be in my room for six or seven hours, cutting up bits of paper with quotes and arranging them on the floor, with this little voice in my head saying, "Hey, this isn't writing!" But at the end of that day, I felt that the resulting section was doing important emotional work” WritingLittlesImportantEndsUseFeltBitsVoiceHoursRoomsCuttingEmotionalPaperSixDecidedHistoricalSevenHeySectionsSequenceHalfwayArrangingNuggetsVoices In My Head Author:George Saunders
“The world I grew up in had both a literal and mythological quality. We were on the borders of several worlds - the larger black world bordered us on one side. More distantly, there was the larger white world. We interacted with some, but not others. If you think of it as an internal geography, it is a land, a contested space with these very charged historical, cultural, and emotional borders.” ThinkingWorldBlackQualityEmotionalHistoricalGeography Author:Margo Jefferson