the why in writing
What Writing Can Help Us Do: Name our experience so we can more fully understand it. Give language to the future we want to create so it stops feeling vague and begins to seem achievable. Build a bridge (neural pathways) between the now we’re experiencing and the future we’d like to create. Heal and engineer our own resilience from past experience.
... See moreAllison Fallon • The Power of Writing It Down: A Simple Habit to Unlock Your Brain and Reimagine Your Life
People don't want you to be perfect. What they want is to feel connected with you.
Joe Hudson • Tweet
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
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
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 is a generosity, even to yourself.
Kurt Vonnegut • Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style
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 increases your rate of revelation. This is true irrespective of the subject because writing is a process of reflection, assertion, and iteration.
Writing clarifies your own ideas. Writing begets new ideas too. Writing lets you explore ideas in depth even if you won’t have time to act on them all. Writing shows people how you think and lets ... See more
Writing clarifies your own ideas. Writing begets new ideas too. Writing lets you explore ideas in depth even if you won’t have time to act on them all. Writing shows people how you think and lets ... See more