Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Quoted: Maggie Nelson on writing and bad ideas

Most of my writing usually feels to me like a bad idea, which makes it hard for me to know which ideas feel bad because they have merit, and which ideas feel bad because they don't. Often I watch myself gravitating toward the bad idea, as if the final girl in a horror movie, albeit one sitting in a Tuff Shed at a desk sticky with milk. But somewhere along the line, from my heroes whose souls were forged in fires infinitely hotter than mine, I gained an outsized faith in articulation itself as its own form of protection. -- Maggie Nelson from The Argonauts
Why self-censorship is among the greatest of sins.