Suppress no urge, douse no flame, do not be shy.
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Quotes tagged ‘Being A Writer’
How does my story get closer to us?
Do you know, yet, what you're writing about? Do you know what is at stake?
One who writes memoir wishes to step into that light, not to see one's own face—that is not possible—but to feel the length of shadow cast by the night.
True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world.
If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us—to write the first draft and then return for the second draft—we are doing the work of memory.
For meaning is not "attached" to the detail by the memoirist; meaning is revealed.
Seeking the congruence between stored image and hidden emotion—that's the real job of memoir.
My narrative self (the culprit who invented) wishes to be discovered by my reflective self, the self who wants to understand and make sense of half-remembered moment.
Memory seeks a permanent home for feeling and image, a habitation where they can live together.
Intimacy with a piece of writing, as with a person, comes from paying attention to the revelations it is capable of giving, not by imposing my own notions and agenda, no matter how well intentioned they might be.
I don't write about what I know, but in order to find out what I know.
The experience was simply there, like a book that has always been on the shelf, whether I ever read it or not, the binding and the title showing as I skim across the contents of my life.
I tell myself no one is going to read my work and that’s how I find the ovaries to get my work put there.
Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last br…
All you need to be a writer is perseverance, a low-level alcohol dependency, and a questionable moral compass.
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
Writing is hard work. It's smoothing and polishing and tucking in the elbows of each paragraph. It's voice and technique and practice. It's mastering style with form, power with control. And I think I know what it's all for. It's for getting closer to the page. It's for getting closer to yourself, t…
The secret, I believe, in writing well about trouble, is choosing carefully the kind of character who will be most troubled by his/her trouble. What is a trial to one person, might be downright relaxing to another. The trouble in your story must push the character to a point where s/he will make a d…
How often do we approach revision fearing what we’ll discover about our stories? What if at the moment when we begin revision, we allow ourselves to dwell most significantly and earnestly in the possibilities of our stories?