“The role of a novice and professional writer coincide but are not identical. We expect more insight – ideas from the professional – and expect more realism from the novice.”
“None of our written thoughts is the final word. Part of the value of writing is to allow a person to subsequently evaluate and modify their thinking patterns.”
“Where do [writers] get [their] ideas? And the answer is that no one knows where the come from and nobody should know. They evolve in thin air, they float down from some mysterious heaven, and we reach and grab one, to grasp in our imagination, and to make it our own. One writer might overhear a conversation in a cafe and a whole novel will be built from that moment. Another might see an article in a newspaper and a plot will suggest itself immediately. Another might hear about an unpleasant incident that happened to a friend of a friend in a supermarket . . . .”
“Good writing is both what one does and does not say.”
“I’m still in bed writing this, lying on my back like an omelette in a pan.”
“In my first draft every sentence I put down is to advance the story. Each subsequent draft - the 3rd, the 7th, the 27th - is trying to turn each of those sentences into a poem.”
“Keep writing. It s all terrible in the beginning.”
“Accessible knowledge is the best kind”
“Scrivere ti trasforma in una persona che sbaglia sempre. La perversione che ti spinge a continuare è l’illusione che un giorno, forse, l’imbroccherai. Che cos’altro potrebbe farlo? Come per tutti i fenomeni patologici, non ti rovina completamente la vita.”
“Can I really write? It’s not as if I ve not got plenty to say. Why then am I silent – silent as the grave?”
“Sometimes you have to take yourself out of your creative space and start with that blank pallet.”
“I m just going wherever the brainstorm takes me.”
“Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they re done they re done. [...] Writers who are swoopers, it seems to me, find it wonderful that people are funny or tragic or whatever, worth reporting, without wondering why or how people are alive in the first place. Bashers, while ostensibly making sentence after sentence as efficient as possible, may actually be breaking down seeming doors and fences, cutting their ways through seeming barbed-wire entanglements, under fire and in an atmosphere of mustard gas, in search of answers to these eternal questions: What in heck should we be doing? What in heck is really going on?”
“Poet, if you can t grow up, at least grow down. Become a carrot, a parsnip. Even a potato. Let the earth conceal your shame. You mistook the mushrooms in your head for truth. Celebrate the actual beauty of mushrooms. Rejoice in their improbabilities. Accept the shortness of the season. Accept the shortness of your own breath. If you cannot suffer light, learn to engender the dark. The poem as hacking cough, as a croaking in the larynx, as a green discharge from blackened lungs. Poet, if you propose to make poems out of your halloween existence, you must learn to shit pumpkins.”
“You need to embrace your process”
“You begin every book as an amateur...I don t know anything in the beginning, which makes it great fun to write, you know? You don t know anything. You don t even know how to write. So you begin every book as an amateur and as a dummy. And in the writing, you discover the book. Of course, you re in charge. But gradually by writing sentence after sentence, the book, as it were, reveals itself through you to your language - through your language, rather. So each sentence is a revelation. I m not exaggerating. Each and every sentence is a revelation. And what you re trying to do is hook one sentence to the sentence before and the next one to that sentence. And as you do, you re building a house, you know? [But] the architect and the contractor, they know what the house will look like when it s done. And that s the big difference. I don t have any idea what it will look like when it s done.”
“Writing down this mission statement is also a great way to wake the page . That s the term I use to describe the act of marking the page for the first time. It s the moment when thought transcends the distance between our inner and outer world, and we breathe life into our ideas.”