Focus like a laser, not a flashlight
The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.
And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.
Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising.
If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.
That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
There's a story behind every person. There's a reason why they're the way they are. Think about that before you judge anyone.
The funny thing about being Catholic, and I was raised Catholic, is that you identify with the Church, just as part of your character. Nevermind what you believe, it's just who you are.
Be able to take any job that gives you experience on a film. Don't just think that you have to be in one department or the other, because through working on one and seeing what other people do in the movie makes you realize what your role is if you become a costume designer.
The development of the meaning attaching to the personal self, the conscious being, is the subject matter of the history of psychology.