Newsletter #10: Salman Rushdie

Jan 16

Photo of Salman Rushdie by Paolo Pellegrin

Happy New Year!

The new year brings a sense of hope, wonder, excitement, and encouragement. Whatever your goals; whatever you are pursuing; I hope 2023 brings you closer to that which your heart desires.

And now here’s this week’s newsletter on Salman Rushdie.

Three Sentences by Rushdie to Imitate and Study

Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so make it true.

from Satanic Verses

Practice: Try this sentence frame using a concept from your writing:

_____ is _____ : the ability to _____, to _____, and by doing so _____.

Here’s an example I came up with:

Loving others is the purpose of life: the ability to recognize the goodness in someone, to express it, and by doing so shining a light on another person’s existence.

II.

I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me.

from Midnight’s Children

Practice: Try this sentence frame using a concept from your writing:

I am _____ , of _____ , of _____.

Here’s an example I came up with:

I am more than all of my failures, of dreams lost, of desires never fulfilled.

III.

But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.

from Shame

Practice: Try this sentence frame using a concept from your writing:

But _____ is like _____ ; (explain how _____ is like _____).

Here’s an example I came up with:

But fear is like a caged bird; feed it with your insecurities and listen to it squawk and scream for more.

Two Quotes by Salman Rushdie on finding a great sentence and going for broke

“Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things–childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves–that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.”

Journal Prompt: Use the following sentence starter and write for 10 minutes: “And never forget that writing is as close as we get…”

II.

“I once went to a book reading by the author Joseph Heller, the author of “Catch-22″ and other books. And he said that most of the books he had written had grown out of a single sentence– that he had written a sentence and he immediately saw that that sentence gave him another couple of hundred of sentences.”

Journal Prompt: What sentence sticks in your head? Why? Write the sentence from memory and spend 5 or 10 minutes free-writing about it. Where does the sentence lead you?

One Cool Thing - Rushdie on the Bill Moyers’ series “Faith & Reason”

Bill talks to writer Salman Rushdie about the politicization of religion and its implication for artists.

Shortly after 9/11, Bill Moyers (Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth) hosted a seven-part series on PBS called “Faith and Reason” in which he discusses the role of religion in the modern world with a variety of writers and thinkers, including Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and others.

In this sixty-minute discussion, Salman Rusdie talks about the intersection and struggles between politics and reason. He discusses his experiences with Muslim extremists who oppose his works, including issuing a fatwa after he published his novel SATANIC VERSES. It’s a fasciniating discussion about a topic that we continue to wrestle with today.

Around the Interwebs

Here are a few links I found that I thought you’d like.

If you’re struggling to find the time to do all the writing and creating you want, then I suggest reading Deb Liu’s Saving 10 Hours a Month
Matthew Dicks’ writes about why we should make the choice to expand our lives.
Jake from the Creative Hackers newsletter describes how to become our true creative self.