10 Quotes & Sayings By Nicholas Trandahl

Nicholas Trandahl is a writer, teacher, and speaker who has spent over thirty years studying the relationships between language, character, and story. He runs an online writing community called StoryGlue, where he teaches others how to help their characters tell their stories. Nicholas's first book, Character Glue, was published in 2011. It's now in its third printing.

1
I write fiction not for my readers and not for myself. I write fiction for the sake of those odd heroic characters that are contained therein. They are counting on me as much as I am counting on them. Nicholas Trandahl
2
I feel like these characters, these places, these beings and plots, and even these inanimate objects are counting on me for survival. It’s my responsibility to reveal them to the world, to show my readers the names of these things, to show them their histories and stories. Nicholas Trandahl
3
It’s my opinion that only in times of utter depression or lofty peace is it appropriate to be creative. Nicholas Trandahl
4
I primarily use poetry as a purge, a self-medication device when I’m in the depths of loneliness, anxiety or in the throes of depression. When I’m lost in the darkness of mental illness, I spill forth a deluge of words and prose that are oftentimes grim, dark and depressive. And when my poems are spilled forth into one of my poetry journals, I feel a weight has been indeed been lifted from me, and my mind can rest just a bit easier. Nicholas Trandahl
5
Edgar Allan Poe’s writings showed me perfectly that there can be such fragile beauty and purity located in darkness and sorrow. Nicholas Trandahl
6
In my own book-signings, I find humility. It’s always humbling when people go out of their way to come visit with me and by some of my books. Nicholas Trandahl
7
As long as I have other ideas and projects noted, I feel confident that they'll be alright until I get to them. And my ideas and tastes may have evolved by the time I get to them so that an idea can be discarded or expanded upon in ways that I wouldn't have thought of had I started on that project right away instead of finishing what I was currently on. It's good to give those ideas time to ripen and blossom. Nicholas Trandahl
8
Give me a bottle of hard cider, a bowl of Peterson Irish Oak in my Neerup pipe, and please, above all, give my Henry David Thoreau’s Wild Apples. Do that and you will see a man contented. Nicholas Trandahl
9
I’m a man of music as much as I am a man of words and prose. One could even possibly say that they, music and prose, are connected to a lengthy and mutually beneficial extent and that they have been of centuries or millenniums. Nicholas Trandahl