Sometimes ritual quiets the racket.

ineffable here—we’re out there somewhere between the known and the unknown, trying to reel in both for a closer look.

The core, ethical concepts in which you most passionately believe are the language in which you are writing.

John Gardner wrote that the writer is creating a dream into which he or she invites the reader, and that the dream must be vivid and continuous.

No one in our town came off looking great. “This is the great tragedy of California,” he wrote in the last paragraph, “for a life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death—the greatest leisure of all.”

But whatever happens, we need to feel that it was inevitable, that even though we may be amazed, it feels absolutely right, that of course things would come to this, of course they would shake down in this way. In order to have this sense of inevitability, the climax of your story will probably only reveal itself to you slowly and over time. You

Annie Dillard has said that day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more.

When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are. The secrecy, the obfuscation, the fact that these monsters can only be hinted at, gives us the sense that they must be very bad indeed. But when people let their monsters out for a little onstage interview, it turns out that we’ve all done or

You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively.