Sarah's writing journal

Having just moved my desk to the window so I can see out, I'm interested to read just today that Flannery O'Connor sat for two hours every day at a typewriter facing the back of a wardrobe so she'd have absolutely nothing to look at. This is from Writers [on Writing], collected essays from The New York Times. Worth buying just for the title of Joyce Carol Oates's piece: To Invigorate Literary Mind, Start Moving Literary Feet or the one I have most sympathy with In the Castle of Indolence You Can Hear the Sound of Your Own Mind by Paul West. I'm a great fan of being lazy and would hate to see us losing the art of it.
The subject of the monologue I'm writing at the moment, Alice Duer Miller, wrote for one of the New York papers on the suffrage movement. Extract from one of her columns:

Why we oppose pockets for women!
1. Because pockets are not a natural right.
2. Because the great majority of women do not want pockets. If they did they would have them.
3. Because it would destroy man’s chivalry toward women, if he did not have to carry all her things in his pocket.
4. Because men are men, and women are women. We must not fly in the face of nature.

She wasn't lazy though. She was a mathematician. Once she said about somebody - they are not exactly well bred, they are not exactly ill bred, they are the sort of person who keeps a parrot. That still makes me laugh.