Write for Your Life

Audience is, after all, one of the great barriers to writing, those outsiders who will peek in and sadly shake their heads: oh, no, not good enough. Even after all this time I still fear that judgment.

E. L. Doctorow once famously said of writing a novel, “It’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

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

if you’ve gotten your own voice down on the page, you will read aloud and think: “Yep, that’s it. That’s me.”

Oral accounts are always mediated by teller and by time.

People constantly make the mistake of thinking that their words on the page should be the equivalent of dress-up clothes. Completely different from everyday. A little stiff, a little remote, proper, mannered, a world away from the T-shirt of ordinary talk.

everyone has a voice.

When you write, you connect with yourself, past, present, and future.

Madeleine L’Engle, who wrote A Wrinkle in Time, once said, “Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.”