Write for Your Life

for a fiction writer the question of where things come from is, in my experience, a bit mysterious.

Oral accounts are always mediated by teller and by time.

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

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

That’s what a journal asks of a writer. Show me yourself.

everyone has a voice.

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.

Anne’s diary is also instructive about how writing, for anyone, for everyone, for you and for me, can normalize the abnormal and feed the spirit, whether during exceptional moments of history or just ordinary moments of everyday life.

Reading the work of others, writing down your own thoughts and feelings: The two are joined.

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.”