Sheila Heti, In Conversation with Herself

Fear, vanity and selfishness make people do terrible things to each other. For thousands of years these have been the engines of stories. But there was no discernible arc to this particular one; Susie would have to be a good writer to make it fill two hundred pages. ‘Is this something you would really like to write about?’ I asked. ‘It depends on w

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‘You mean fictionalizing your experience? Or writing something different inspired by it? Or just totally different?’ ‘What do you think?’ ‘I think making stuff up is harder.’ It was like being a doctor sometimes, sitting there at my desk, hearing about symptoms and trying to locate their source, dispensing advice while discreetly keeping an eye on

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To build up “a huge archive of thinking and feeling” seems a necessary project for any artist, even without publication as the eventual goal.

When I first started writing essays, I couldn’t figure out where to put myself in the text. Trying to situate the “I,” which is necessarily attached to a body, has always felt like a trap. I didn’t want to succumb to that well-known female imperative of the confessional, “relatable” mode, where revealing your self is the basis for all your subseque... See more

nothing else, a diary teaches you what you’re interested in. Perhaps at the beginning you restrict yourself to issues of social injustice or all the unfortunate people trapped beneath the rubble in Turkey or Italy or wherever the last great earthquake hit. You keep the diary you feel you should be keeping, the one that, if discovered by your mother

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The writer and psychoanalyst Marion Milner, on the value of writing and journaling:

I had often thought that novelists and poets had a special advantage in learning how to live, their writings providing them with an instrument that most of us were denied. By being able to dramatize their own difficulties they were in a far better position for solvin

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