why I write
An essay is not a vehicle of knowledge transmission; it is a landscape to think in, and a path to get there.
... See moreBeing at the edge of something means that there’s something new ahead. You’ve come up against the wall of the proverbial box, whether that’s your own capacities, your own knowledge, your expertise of a medium. You can either retreat away from the edges and stay in the box or tear it down and build a new one. Or decide that boxes actually aren’t you
edges via Creative Fuel
Where is that turning point for a writer? It comes to me late in my research process, when my head is so full of information that the urge to write overpowers me. My ideas may not be fully formulated, but I need to get them down on the page to know how to refine them. This is what Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called the “simplici... See more
Dan Shipper • How David Perell Writes an Essay
So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.
Why I Write by George Orwell
We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.
(William Boyd, Any Human Heart)
If I want to be a writer who is any good, I really think I am going to have to be bored more often, which means sequestering my attention to my surroundings: the mundane, the slow, the IRL.