On Writing

See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do... on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the wo... See more

14.

Here’s my point. Some people think that writing is merely the process of picking the right words and putting them in the right order, like stringing beads onto a necklace. But the power of those words, if there is any, doesn’t live inside the words themselves. On its own, “Love the questions” is nearly meaningless. Those words only come alive w... See more

Paul Valery speaks of the 'une Hgne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself.

My own experience of inspiration is certainly that of a line or a phrase or a word or sometimes something still vague, a dim cloud of an idea which I feel must be condensed into a shower of words. The pec... See more

Most of the students who came into the Writing Center thought the problem with their essay was located somewhere between their forehead and the paper in front of them. That is, they assumed their thinking was fine, but they were stuck on this last, annoying, arbitrary step where they have to find the right words for the contents of their minds.

But... See more

making art is hard. there is no cheat code that would make it easy. excavating the soul should be hard; it would be alarming if it wasn’t. the satisfaction you feel, however, when you see the words trooping along the page exactly as you dreamed them up, melodic and honest; it is heaven made real.

I was writing for some clear, single person—I would say myself, because I was quite content to be the only reader. I thought that everything that needed to be written had been written: there was so much. I am not being facetious when I say I wrote it in order to read it. And I think that is what makes the difference, because I could look at it as a... See more

To write in a real voice, an alive voice, I have to trust my own eyes, what I see before I start to think. Of course my observations will be flawed—all individual perspectives are partial and distorted—but the only way I can gain autonomy is to write from my incomplete point of view. Put like that, autonomy comes from trust in the self, in subjecti... See more

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.