the why in writing
Living life as an artist is a practice. You are either engaging in the practice or you’re not.
Rick Rubin • The Creative Act: A Way of Being
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
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
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.
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
a fabulous way to get unstuck in your life is to get writing.
Allison Fallon • The Power of Writing It Down: A Simple Habit to Unlock Your Brain and Reimagine Your Life
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.
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