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.

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

written down, it lives. It’s there, it’s real. That’s the important thing. That’s why we write things down, to give them life.

words are actions. They punch, tear, hurt, harm, soothe, amuse, educate, illuminate. They express ideas and feelings, and they make people feel better, and they move them to tears, and they enrage them, and they define them. We are all made of nouns, live by verbs, enlarge and entertain ourselves with adjectives and adverbs.

“That physical act is what makes a poem come alive,” he says. “And unlike other writing, a poem has a physical shape, a physical dimension on the page. It does not have the block arrangement of prose.”

everyone has a voice.

I have some fellow writer friends who love to revise. It is in the rewriting, they like to say, that the true shape of their work emerges. It is the most rewarding, even pleasurable part of the process. I learned long ago when they said this to arrange my face, because it did not seem useful to let them see my thoughts writ large there, which were

don’t make how it’s done an excuse. How it’s done is how you do it.

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