In writing, “[y]ou have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver. … [T]hink of the writers who have given a book to [you], and then write a book back to them.”
– Anne LaMott, Amercian novelist and nonfiction writer, b. 1954, in Bird by Bird
“Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity … to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.”
– Lorrie Moore, American short story writer, b. 1957, in an essay in The Agony and the Ego
“[T]he more we try to pretend that fear doesn’t and shouldn’t exist, the more we hurt our own chances to create whatever it is [we] dream about. … I don’t think fear is a shameful thing that we must rid ourselves of. It is a natural part of taking the risks that writers do. And the logical reaction to fear should indeed be bravery.”
– Dan Blank, media consultant and teacher, on Writer Unboxed
“To live a creative life, we need to lose our fear of being wrong.”
— Joseph Chilton Pearce, American child educator and author, b. 1926
“Writing should be concrete. It should evoke images and refer to something the reader can identify with particular experiences. A general concept like motion is interesting to a philosopher, but an ordinary reader wants to know what is moving, how fast, whether it is going toward him or away from him, and what effect the motion of this object will have on his income or his likelihood of getting a good night’s sleep.”
— Sumner Ives, A New Handbook for Writers 317 (1960).
“Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.”
John Updike, American novelist and more (1932-2009), “The Importance of Fiction,” in Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism 86 (1991)
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
— Thomas Merton, American Trappist monk, writer, and activist (1915-1968)
” A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”
— Charles Peguy, French poet and essayist (1873-1914)
(Thanks to P.J. Coldren for sharing this.)
“How can anyone say what happens, even if each of us dips a pen a hundred million times into ink?”
– Rumi, in The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Banks with John Moyne
“Stories are not innocent.
Stories change things.
Stories can limit and reinforce one version of how life must be or they can open up possibilities of how life might be.”
— Sharon Wildwind, Canadian-American novelist and artist
(Photo: part of a series of pins Wildwind created for the Calgary Steampunk Assemblage; clock parts, wire, broken jewelry, alcohol ink, beads, leather backing and pin.)
Writing is hard sometimes. The craft is challenging, the pressures of publication and promotion daunting. The best thing we can do is to get out of our way, and remember that writing is our passion, our play, our refuge, and our privilege.
“It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horse, the leaves, the wind, the words that my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.”
-Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)