As Dorianne Laux wrote, "Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's."

Part of what I need to do to make a familiar place interesting is to never let it be the same place. That means trying to see or hear things that I didn't see or hear the day before.

A fascinating fact is that the syntax center of the brain is in the part where we process music, not in the part responsible for vocabulary acquisition. So making beautiful sentences is a musical endeavor.

Prove

I let a thought prove in my head overnight.

In the morning I check to see what's risen.

I try to expect nothing, which is exactly

what I deserve. What kind of woman

demands her head deliver? But sometimes

I wake to a thought doubled, tripled in size

and as good sour as anything grown in the dark.

White space in fiction or narrative nonfiction can act like cuts in film: a way to shift from location A to location B, or from scene to scene.

One of the most pervasive myths about writing is that specificity is limiting. It's just the opposite. You might think that a poem about love or truth or freedom—a large abstraction—would reach more people if it were written with universality in mind. But if your goal is to speak to everyone, and to remove particulars from the piece because others

In prose, white space can indicate transitions in time, place, or ideas, and it can do some of the work line breaks do in verse. White space can be disruptive, showcasing, or suspense-building. White space is a charged silence that activates the imagination and slows the reader down.

I begin my writing time by reading, pen in hand, because I know what is likely to happen: A word, phrase, sentence, or idea will open a door for me. Behind that door, if I'm lucky, might be a poem or an essay of my own.

There's no better feeling than when I'm after something, and I can sense it nearby, but I don't quite know what it is yet. The poem or essay hasn't materialized, but I trust that it will.