Sometimes we simply have to write stories we don’t want to write to learn how to choose the right stories.
Read More
There is nothing like living with failure to understand it can’t kill you and that success can’t save you.
Read More
The news does not cover endings, only middles.
Read More
When I write, I care about each word, and it’s the caring more than what we call craft that leads me somewhere that is as pleasing as it is surprising.
Read More
But before I could tell a new story, I spent several years literally reminding to myself, on the page or on long walks, that people wanted to be happy.
Read More
If the story she chooses to tell is most natural to her, if it requires none of the effort she had come to associate with success, she may feel a bit as if she’s given up.
Read More
Despair is just my guidance recognizing a lie and trying, in the only language it has, to point me back to what is true.
Read More
Proofreading feels like a rather grownup thing to do, requiring me, as it does, to take as much responsibility for the final product as possible.
Read More
I come up with an idea about how to relate to someone, or write a story, or teach a workshop, and do not always notice how that idea is aging.
Read More
I do change, but not without first putting up a good fight.
Read More
I understand now how irreplaceable that internal knowing is.
Read More
I was young, and still harbored the idea that there were certain creative standards everyone on earth could agree on.
Read More
The seed of a desire was planted, and love and attention allowed it grow.
Read More
Genuine grief can summon you to the moment as immediately as joy.
Read More
To be in that writing frame of mind, I can’t think about the result of my writing, of simply getting it done.
Read More
It’s easy to get our talent twisted up with approval and attention and admiration, a means by which those supposed rewards will be gained.
Read More
This is perhaps the most useful function of the New Year’s resolution: acknowledging the power and inevitability of choice.
Read More
Every time I believe I have reached the end of what I need to learn about the patience required to write I am wrong.
Read More
Easy to start slapping labels and titles and definitions on everyone I meet. Put someone in a box and you think you understand them.
Read More
I didn’t want to leave the chair, in fact, because as soon as I did, I knew I’d be caught up once again in the momentum of my day.
Read More