When you write what you know, you stay in control. One of the first things I encourage my writing students to do is to lose control – say what they want to say, break structure.
Ninety percent of writing is about listening.
We must continue to open in the face of tremendous opposition. No one is encouraging us to open and still we must peel away the layers of the heart.
My desolation was that no one knew me and I did not know myself. My family’s life was my life. I knew nothing else. I was clothed, fed, given a bed to sleep in, encouraged to marry early and rich, and loved in a generic way – I was “the big one,” which meant the older and my sister was the ‘little one” – but no one spoke to me, no one explained anything.
Jump in, no excuses. Exert the force of your life. Persevere under all circumstances.
We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.
When you draw and pay attention to what is, it’s a form of being present. This inspires the mind, makes it happy, and the heart wants to express more.
Lighting a candle helps create a sense of magic.
Writing can be very lonely. Who’s going to read it, who cares about it?
Reach out of the deep chasm of your loneliness and express yourself to another human being.
It’s a lot better to sound like Ernest Hemingway than like Aunt Bethune, who thinks Hallmark greeting cards contain the best poetry in America.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth, and it spreads out from the page into all of our life, and it should.
We have lived! Our moments are important. This is what it is to be a writer: to be the carrier of details that make up history.
Being an artist in our society makes us lonely. Everyone else leaves in the morning for work and structured jobs. Artists live outside that built in social system.
A writer’s job is to make the ordinary come alive, to awaken ourselves to the specialness of simply being.
Writing is egalitarian; it cuts across geographic, class, gender, and racial lines.
The terrible thing about public school is they take young children who are natural poets and storytellers and have them read literature and then step away from it and talk “about it”.
If you missed the mouse today, you’ll get it tomorrow. You never leave who you are. If you are a writer when writing, you are also a writer when you are cooking, sleeping, walking. And if you are a mother, a painter, a horse, a giraffe, or a carpenter, you will bring that into your writing, too.
We learn writing by doing it.
Suzuki Roshi once said to his Sixties American students that the way they dressed- with beads, long hair, brightly colored clothes-they all looked alike. Shave your heads, wear black robes, he said- Ah, now I can see your uniqueness. Our ideas and intentions can mask and cover up a story; there is a life force that will declare itself if you let it. Get out of the way.