Write for Your Life

Instead of honoring our own voice, the one that is so individual and specific, we think of writing in terms of other people’s work.

words on the page, certainly in a journal entry, usually in a letter, should carry the stamp of individuality.

that work that has been edited and then revised is, in my experience, notably better than work that has not. But the problem for students, particularly students who are used to doing well, is that having a paper handed back for another go-round implies not a desire for improvement but a verdict of failure.

progress too often enters the room as a binary, the computer or the typewriter, one way or another, when it should be a both.

Writing can excavate the heart, lay it bare. Even if its only reader is the person who wrote it in the first place, it can promote understanding, not only of others but of our deepest selves.

there is a promise implicit in those notes, the promise of something better, perhaps even really good.

Perhaps one reason Anne was able to be so open was that, from the beginning, she thought of her writing as a conversation with a friend, a friend who understood, who listened, who would never pass judgment. Kitty, she called her, but of course she was Anne’s other self, perhaps even, she imagined, a more insightful or accepting self.

It is humbling to see how much crossing out Dickens did, how much rewriting and cutting.

I have to write to discover what I am doing. —Flannery O’Connor