Sublime

It helps, I think, to keep hold of something of that older sense of the writer as a carver of sentences. Consider the sentence as a crafted object that will take up space in three dimensions.

I know that girl would go on, that she would grow up, have children and love them, that despite loving them she would get too sick to care for them, be hospitalized, get better, and then get sick again. I know a shrink would say, Write it down, how you got here.

Hemingway said, “Write hard and clear about what hurts.” Don’t avoid it. It has all the energy. Don’t worry, no one ever died of it. You might cry or laugh, but not die.

When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.

Birth, death and grief

Style is as simple and direct as that. It requires digesting your experience, whatever that experience is, so you may write about it.

As the novelist Philip Roth said of his work: ‘Over the years what you develop is a tolerance for your own crudeness. And patience with your own crap, really. Belief in your crap, which is just “stay with your crap and it will get better, and come back every day and keep going”.’