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

Stories begin with microscopic-level detail, in the particularities that make up each individual life.

An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this. How can a writer extend an appealing invitation—one that’s difficult, even, to refuse? We’ve all heard the advice writing teachers give: Open a book in the middle of a dramatic or compelling situation,

I think I read recently that we’re not suffering from an overflow of information—we’re suffering from an overflow of insignificance.

Memorization was a way for me to force myself to be more precise, and to forge a more permanent relationship to the words.

So an intriguing context is important, and so is style. But for me, a good opening sentence really begins with voice.

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.

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.

the first sentence is the handshake, on either side of the writer-reader divide.

But we have to turn it in—and at that point, you are guided by craft. You get to do your anarchy, try this and try that, try everything, and then apply craft.

There’s really only one audience for poetry these days: poets themselves.