I had found my compass, the internal light by which all my creative endeavors would be guided.
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I wasn’t trying to get anything. I just wanted to share something that felt good to share.
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Sometimes we simply have to write stories we don’t want to write to learn how to choose the right stories.
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There is nothing like living with failure to understand it can’t kill you and that success can’t save you.
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The news does not cover endings, only middles.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Despair is just my guidance recognizing a lie and trying, in the only language it has, to point me back to what is true.
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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.
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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.
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I do change, but not without first putting up a good fight.
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I understand now how irreplaceable that internal knowing is.
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I was young, and still harbored the idea that there were certain creative standards everyone on earth could agree on.
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The seed of a desire was planted, and love and attention allowed it grow.
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Genuine grief can summon you to the moment as immediately as joy.
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To be in that writing frame of mind, I can’t think about the result of my writing, of simply getting it done.
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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.
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This is perhaps the most useful function of the New Year’s resolution: acknowledging the power and inevitability of choice.
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Every time I believe I have reached the end of what I need to learn about the patience required to write I am wrong.
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