Here’s where I share my latest diversion, and that’s finding inspiring, beautiful, royalty-free images and mixing them with writer quotes. Then I use them as backgrounds on my laptop, desktop, and classroom computer.
Because writers need as much inspiration as they can get, right?
G’head, download away. (Click the image, then right-click and choose ‘Save Image As…’ — unless you’re steering a Mac. Then, you do whatever Mac users do.)
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Rafting on the Umba River, Murmansk Oblast, Russia. Photo by Alexander Chechetkin.
The quote:
“What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in.” — Flaubert
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A male and female lion, doing what lions do. Photo by Chad Littlejohn.
The quote:
“Metaphor is supposed to state the unknown in terms of the known. It is supposed to say X equals Y. Yet when we say ‘John is a lion,’ we do not think of John with a mane, with four clawed paws, nor with a pompon tipped tail. We extract from ‘lion’ the emotional equivalent we need and let the rest go. The real metaphoric formula is X does-and-does-not-equal Y.” — John Ciardi
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Oh, wow. A view of Earth from outer space. I’m thinking a private suborbital flight. Photo by peter_w, who assures us he took this photo himself. (Go, Peter!)
And the quote:
“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.” — William Faulkner
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The chessboard. Photo by T. Al Nakib.
The quote:
“The adjective is the enemy of the noun.” — Voltaire
This is the biggest, cheesiest hack in all my html history. Why the hell can’t I space these stupid pictures properly? Argh!
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Okay, another lion. It’s not that I have a lion thing. I just couldn’t pass up this shot. Photo by Juliane Riedl.
The quote:
“If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it.” — H. G. Wells
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Little piggies are so cute! (And tasty. Some would say.) Photo by Pieter van der Wulp, in the Netherlands.
The quote:
“It isn’t merely that the reviewers are so much cleverer than I, and could write such superior fictions if they deigned to; it’s that even the on-cheering ones have read a different book than the one you wrote. All the little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.” — John Updike
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I figure I can’t go wrong here. Writers and cats are like… well, wizards and familiars. Photo by Falk Schaaf.
The quote:
“‘The first law of writing,’ said Macaulay, ‘that law to which all others are subordinate, is this: that the words employed shall be such as to convey to the reader the meaning of the writer.’ Toward that end, use familiar words—words that your readers will understand, and not words they will have to look up. No advice is more elementary, and no advice is more difficult to accept. When we feel an impulse to use a marvelously exotic word, let us lie down until the impulse goes away.” — James J. Kilpatrick
