writing

The privilege of a novelist is that you’re able to sit for three years by yourself, and no one’s interfering with anything if you don’t want them to. If you have faith in your writing, it’s easy. It’s when you remove that faith that things become difficult—when you start to think, this is stupid, this is idiotic, this is worthless , and so on. That

My writing is riddled with such tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the tremblings, then go back in later and slash them out. In this way I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native nor foreign to me.

The act of committing things to writing has been shown to be critical both in changing a person’s mind 7 and in making imagined stories feel more real. 8 Write in the present tense: “The speech is going well…” Or, even better, in the past tense: “The speech was a complete triumph…”

According to this Wall Street Journal veteran, the key to obit writing — or more expansive memoir, for that matter — can be summed up in three questions: What were you trying to do with your life? Why? And how did it work out?

I might, at one time, become a twenty-year-old lesbian. Another time I’ll be a thirty-year-old unemployed househusband. I put my feet into the shoes I’m given then, make my foot size fit those shoes, and then start to act. That’s all it is. I don’t make the shoes fit my foot size but, rather, make my feet fit the shoes.

All I had done was sit down and riff on whatever came into my head. There were no complicated words, no elaborate phrases, no elegant style. I had just thrown it together as I went along.

Hemingway explains further in another passage:

The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

What always works and brings sometimes unexpected benefits, however, is committing to writing as a consistent, devotional, and dedicated practice. We’ve never met anyone who committed to a writing practice over years and regretted it.