Susan Reynolds > Quotes

“Embrace Cursive Schools are downplaying—and even eliminating—the need to learn to write cursive, despite its necessity to engage highly complex cognitive processes and achieve mastery of a precise motor coordination. (It takes children years to master handwriting and some stroke victims relearn language by tracing letters with their fingers.) Writing in cursive also increases a sense of harmony and balance, and writing on paper provides creative options: to manipulate the medium in multidimensional, innovative, or expressive ways (such as cutting, folding, pasting, ripping, or coloring the paper). Also, when you write in longhand on paper and then edit, there’ll be a visual and tactile record of your creative process for you and others to study. Learning to write (and writing) in cursive, on paper, fosters creativity and should not be surrendered.”
― Susan Reynolds, Fire Up Your Writing Brain: How to Use Proven Neuroscience to Become a More Creative, Productive, and Successful Writer

“Berlin says hedgehogs adhere to one unshakeable conceptual and stylistic unity, clinging to a single, universal, organizing principle that he or she fervently believes; whereas foxes adapt his or her strategy to the circumstances, seizing the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects, seeking to fit them into—or exclude them from—an unchanging, sometimes fanatical unitary inner vision.”
― Susan Reynolds, Fire Up Your Writing Brain: How to Use Proven Neuroscience to Become a More Creative, Productive, and Successful Writer

“I used to read a thesaurus searching for the words that meant exactly what I felt. And I could never find them. I could see shades of meaning in the different ways something could be said; I could appreciate the difference, say, between the verbs ‘fall’ and ‘catapult.’ But when I had a feeling like sadness, I couldn’t find a word that meant everything that I felt inside of me. I always felt that words were inadequate, that I’d never been able to express myself—ever. Even now, it’s so hard to express what I think and feel, the totality of what I’ve seen.”
― Susan Reynolds, Fire Up Your Writing Brain: How to Use Proven Neuroscience to Become a More Creative, Productive, and Successful Writer

“swoopers write a story quickly, which in his description is: “higgledly-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work; [while] bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they're done they're done.”
― Susan Reynolds, Fire Up Your Writing Brain: How to Use Proven Neuroscience to Become a More Creative, Productive, and Successful Writer

“you have to learn to recognize a metaphor before you can create one.”
― Susan Reynolds, Fire Up Your Writing Brain: How to Use Proven Neuroscience to Become a More Creative, Productive, and Successful Writer

“In all the scientific efforts to find magic pills for fighting off dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, only regular, aerobic exercise and active mental engagement show any measurable results. Rather”
― Susan Reynolds, Fire Up Your Writing Brain: How to Use Proven Neuroscience to Become a More Creative, Productive, and Successful Writer