writing is a communication, not a technique.

There is an emotional tone or flavor to it, an “intimation of mood or feeling” as Goethe called it.

By understanding that your work is with invisibles, by consciously working to inhabit words, by filling your words with meaning, with waters from the deep psyche, the words come alive.

You are not there to serve the rules of language that some grammarian has given you as law. Any writer who forgets that loses the only thing that truly matters to the craft.

That is, first they write and then they pause a minute to check what they have written. In that moment of pause they do something specific, something on which the whole art of the craft depends. Some nonphysical part of them reaches out and touches the work, feels it, to see if what they have done is right, is congruent. It senses the meanings in t

To write inhabited words, to live an inhabited life, it is crucial to leave the certainty of dry land, to step into something liquid and moist, to immerse the self in the deep interior life that flows beneath the shallow surface of reason. And the key to this, to finding that deep interior life, is feeling.

If you wish to be more than a typist of words, you have no choice, you must extend awareness further than society wants it to go. You must travel in the mythic and living landscapes that lie outside of and beyond the statistical mentality. You must enter dark waters. At minimum that means understanding that the primary thing a writer works with is

The key to the kind of writing I’m talking about in this book is feeling, not thinking. The art of nonfiction has nothing to do with the reductionistic behaviors necessary to get some words on a page while following the rules of grammar.

You can’t start writing until you know what you are doing, and you don’t know what you are doing until you start writing.