If you don’t know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it.
Just take it bird by bird.
In biblical times, they used to stone a few thirteen-year-olds with some regularity, which helped keep the others quiet and at home. The mothers were usually in the first row of stone throwers, and had to be restrained.
I tried to cooperate with grace, which is to say, I did not turn on the TV.
The reality is that most of us lived our first decades feeling welcome only when certain conditions applied: we felt safe and embraced only when the parental units were getting along, when we were on our best behavior, doing well in school, not causing problems, and had as few needs as possible. If you needed more from them, best of luck.
See how the fearful chandelier Trembles above you Each time you open your mouth To sing. Sing. – DONALD JUSTICE.
God makes a way out of no way.
Yet, I get to tell my truth. I get to seek meaning and realization. I get to live fully, wildly, imperfectly. That’s why I’m alive. And all I actually have to offer as a writer, is my version of life. Every single thing that has happened to me is mine. As I’ve said a hundred times, if people wanted me to write more warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must.
E. L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
But the idea of spending entire days in someone else’s office doing someone else’s work did not suit my father’s soul.
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding space,’ to quote the late, great Zora Neale Hurston. It.
Sin is not the adult bookstore on the corner. It is the hard heart, the lack of generosity, and all the isms, racism and sexism and so forth. But is there a crack where a ribbon of light might get in, might sneak past all the roadblocks and piles of stones, mental and emotional and cultural? We.
There is so much mercy around us and in us, so much available to us if we just have the eyes and intention to see it.
Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken.
Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve thought that there was something noble and mysterious about writing, about the people who could do it well, who could create a world as if they were little gods or sorcerers. All my life I’ve felt that there was something magical about people who could get into other people’s minds and skin, who could take people like me out of ourselves and then take us back to ourselves. And you know what? I still do.
I love to be, and so often am, right.
There is a real skill to hearing all those words that real people – and your characters – say and to recording what you have heard – and the latter is or should be more interesting and concise and even more true than what was actually said.
Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein. But you can’t do that if you’re not respectful. If you look at people and just see sloppy clothes or rich clothes, you’re going to get them wrong.
Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on. Now, if you ask me, what’s going on is that we’re all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another.