writing

And when it comes to the work of writing—which is also the work of thinking, reading, and living—I’ll say this. As a human being, intellectual discovery and gratification are your birthright. Nothing is more worthy, and more self-actualizing, than taking your interests seriously and pursuing them as far as you can go.

if you think of writing as a process , then you understand that writing badly is the only way to begin writing well, and the output isn’t the piece—it’s the mind that labored earnestly to produce the piece.

What I mean to say is that for many contemporary writers today, they are not working from life itself. They are working from a mediation of life. They are working from a set of abstractions that have been conveyed to them via reality television and cinema and social media. Their reality is already a story world, and so when it comes time to... See more

I think in part because we are so accustomed to receiving life through the mediation of a screen. What these writers are writing is not life. They are writing a mediation of life in stock moves and maneuvers they have gotten from somewhere else without fully understanding them. How else does one arrive at the notion to write in first-person without... See more

A scene is not life. A scene is an orderly storytelling unit, set off by the filmic narrator or the editors, the person in charge of structuring the montage. So that while it might seem like life, it is actually highly ordered, designed to elicit a particular response or to achieve some greater narrative end. The arbitrariness that gives the sense... See more

That is, every time you write, She could hear or He could see or They felt , you are describing looking at someone while they undergo perception. You do not need that extra step of noting that someone is noting something. Where did that come from? I believe that extra step was inserted by cinema. You are so accustomed to looking at someone looking... See more