writing

When Groff starts something new, she writes it out longhand in large spiral notebooks. After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a bankers box — and never reads it again. Then she’ll start the book over, still in longhand, working from memory. The idea is that this way, only the best, most vital bits survive.

“It’s not even the words on the

George R.R. Martin actually leans away from outlines as well, and he describes these two camps of writing style as “architects” and “gardeners”:

“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house…

The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and

he tries to live by writer George Saunders’ advice: “Stop trying to teach the world something and instead refuse to be boring.”

“Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.”

― William Wordsworth

That’s what I want to do,” she said, through tears. “I want to walk and think and let the book come to me

How to Find Your River of Meaning?

Well, I wish I could say it was easy, but this is among the many maddening, glorious struggles of writing. Our metaphorical rivers are something we discover along the way, in our first drafts if we are lucky, in re-working our fourth or fifth drafts more likely. We don’t impose our underlying rivers of emotional

Joyce Carol Oates compared flash fiction to Frost's classic definition of a poem-"a structure of words that consumes itself as it unfolds, like ice melting on a stove."

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can