I don’t think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.
I think talent is like a water table under the earth – you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.
The difference between neurosis and wisdom is struggle.
All of us can create if we allow ourselves to.
Actually, every time we begin, we wonder how we did it before, Each time is a new journey with no maps.
One poem or story doesn’t matter one way or the other. It’s the process of writing and life that matters.
Life is not orderly. No matter how we try to make it so, right in the middle of it we die, lose a leg, fall in love, or drop a jar of applesauce.
Handwriting is more connected to the movement of the heart.
Too often we take notes on writing, we think about writing but never do it. I want you to walk into the heart of the storm, written words dripping off hair, eyelids, hanging from hands.
The aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what you mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel.
Never underestimate people. They do desire the cut of truth.
In the past few years I’ve assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people – people who supposedly want to write – read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.
Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do it.
Anything we fully do is an alone journey.
After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.
Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.
I remember a friend many years ago who had taped a sign to his refrigerator: There’s a dream dreaming us. If you try to think about what that means it makes your mind silly, but that silliness is good.
The things that make you a functional citizen in society – manners, discretion, cordiality – don’t necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners...
I am free to write the worst junk in the world.
First thoughts have tremendous energy. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash.