Katagiri Roshi said in his book Returning to Silence (Shambhala, 1988) that it is not important whether a spiritual teacher has reached the peak or not; what is important is how he has digested the truth he has experienced and how much this truth is manifested in the teacher’s life moment by moment. This is true in writing, too. How much have I

Be patient. It will evolve. What do you feel akin to? What do you like reading? It takes time to find a true form for yourself. And even then, once you find it, you have to push your edges. You can’t get too comfortable.

I knew what I wanted to say—I just had to find a form to say it in. Once I had the structure, all I had to do was fill it.

We should use a structure but make it our own. In other words, each time we write something, we reinvent that structure to fit ourselves and what we want to say. This is not arrogance. We honor structure, but we don’t become frozen by an old one.

My friend Rob, who is an interior designer, walks into a house and moves walls, raises the roof, and puts in a window where it was solid. Each time I visit his house in Albuquerque, it is a new shape. A building is his structure, but he plays with it. I see a wall as a wall, indestructible, forever. He removes the wall. That is the relationship an

“Not gifted with genius but honestly holding his experience deep in his heart, he kept his simplicity and humanity.” Finally, don’t worry about style. Be who you are, breathe fully, be alive, and don’t forget to write.

Style in writing is not something glib—oh, yeah, she has style. It means becoming more and more present, settling deeper and deeper inside the layers of ourselves and then speaking, knowing what we write echoes all of us; all of who we are is backing our writing. That is very solid ground to stand on.

Style requires digesting who we are. It comes from the inside. It does not mean I write like Flannery O’Connor or Willa Cather, but that I have fully digested their work, and on top of this or with this I have also fully digested my life:

This is how it works: You’ve always wanted to be a writer, but instead you decide you should become a health care worker. You go to school for four years. You get a degree in social work. You are at your first day of your new job, listening to an orientation, and you realize you really did want to be a writer. You quit your job, go to the library