The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling

Because that is what words are: the crystallization in language of thousands of years of experience across numerous cultures and civilizations, each word being the almost tangible flesh in

Percy Shelley in “A Defense of Poetry,”

I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters. —Frank Lloyd Wright

Using the notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Albert Camus as examples, I ask them to maintain a writer’s workbook, one they are to fill daily with images, ideas, scraps of language, character sketches, overheard dialogue, and so forth, that they can use when revising their fiction.

In one of his lectures, Robert Thurman, a Buddhist scholar, disciple of the Dalai Lama, and director of Tibet House in New York City

fiction with detail and nuance.

Sartre once wrote, “Every sentence is a risk.” Well might he have added, “Every word is a risk,” for precision in word choice is of paramount importance.

I would venture to say voice is absent in apprentice writing precisely because the writer has yet to develop for himself (or herself) a vision of how the world works.

But where the experience of nothingness for Sartre led to despair and nausea, the experience of shūnyatā for a Buddhist is the occasion for joy; it is a guarantee that we can change and eventually realize liberation from suffering.

“That’s all right,” he said, “because I’m a better person when I’m writing. Standing here, talking to you now, I can’t revise my words. If I say something wrong or not quite right, or maybe offensive and it hurts someone, the words are out there, public, and I can’t take them back. I have to rely on you to revise or fix them for me. But when I’m wr