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

writers sometimes call the “As you know, Bob,” paragraph, in which you do this big info dump. There’s pleasure in working it out. Besides, brief, understated descriptions tend to better serve the lens of character. Real people don’t think of things in quite so many adverbs, or adjectives.

The white wall (once of paper, now of pixels) will only open to the right key,

With really good books, a powerful sense of voice is established in the first line.

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

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.

Jack Gilbert addresses this experience directly in “A Brief for the Defense”: “If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,” he writes, “we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.”

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.

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.

If I am patient and open, at some point, the wordless feeling I’m trying to express will drive the story to whatever the end point is.