Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process

“Do you have the courage to be a poet?” Gilbert asked the graduate student, after all. We need courage to take ourselves seriously, to look closely and without flinching, to regard the things that frighten us in life and art with wonder.

We’re all cursed to haunt and revisit the people and places that confine us. But when you can pick and choose the terms of that confinement, you, and not your prison, hold the power.

The most powerful human emotions are terribly difficult to explain in a way that doesn’t diminish them, or that doesn’t make you look slightly ridiculous in the telling. How easy to safeguard them then, and keep things close, rather than risk looking foolish or being misheard.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Bannerman came to regard the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as hypnagogic sigils preceding the dream-state of film.”

What I have to do is go back to my beginner’s mind, trying as much as possible to get rid of all my assumptions, the usual pat thoughts, the confusions I have, the conclusions that cause me to contrive direction in the story.

Poetry privileges subjectivity. It foregrounds the interior life of the writer, who is trying to draw in a reader. And it gets readers into contact with their own subjective life.

It was like a one-two combination punch. The jab was a man, a dangerous man, looking at the protagonist without the slightest concern. He had a gun but didn’t bother lifting it. He was sitting down but saw no reason to stand. And then came the straight right cross: The first-person narrator told me that this dangerous man was as calm as an adobe wa

it’s not just the reader’s way in, it’s the writer’s way in also, and you’ve got to find a doorway that fits us both. I think that’s why my books tend to begin as first sentences—I’ll write that opening sentence first, and when I get it right I’ll start to think I really have something.

For me, almost everything in literature almost always comes down to the question of point of view. Whose story is this, and who’s telling the story of that person?