the why in writing
Writing is a generosity, even to yourself.
Kurt Vonnegut • Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style
You cannot write your words without living them. You cannot share your words without writing them.
Allison Fallon • The Power of Writing It Down: A Simple Habit to Unlock Your Brain and Reimagine Your Life
All novels, short stories, and plays, and most poems, are about human transformation. The subject of the novel is the human spirit and psyche—how the characters interact in their relationships with other souls and with the world in general.
Walter Mosley • This Year You Write Your Novel
Metamorphic words…attempt to change the author in unpredictable ways, which you can think of as an intrinsic reward of sorts…If you don’t like, or are bored with, who you are right now, whether as a writer, or more generally as a person, you can write yourself into an unpredictable new version. It’s a kind of disruptive self-authorship lottery.
The primary task of a writer is to write well. (And to go on writing well. Neither to burn out nor to sell out.) ... Let the dedicated activist never overshadow the dedicated servant of literature — the matchless storyteller.
Susan Sontag on Storytelling, What It Means to Be a Good Human Being, and Her Advice to Writers
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about [italics mine]. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
Kurt Vonnegut • Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style
Writing, more visibly and unquestionably today than ever, is inherently networked. It begins and remains connected to its subject, and to everything else, becoming part of it. It acts. It does work. It lives. When we write, we reconfigure the world.
James Bridle • Why I Write
A writer’s greatest responsibility is to his readers, to keep providing them with the best work that he is capable of turning out.
Haruki Murakami • Novelist as a Vocation
Writing is prayer, spirituality, self-discovery, communication, therapy, connection.
Allison Fallon • The Power of Writing It Down: A Simple Habit to Unlock Your Brain and Reimagine Your Life
a fabulous way to get unstuck in your life is to get writing.