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We walk through so many myths of each other and ourselves; we are so thankful when someone sees us for who we are and accepts us.
We have to look at our own inertia, insecurities, self-hate, fear that, in truth, we have nothing valuable to say. It is true that when we begin anything new, resistances fly in our face. Now you have the opportunity to not run or be tossed away, but to look at them black and white on paper and see what their silly voices say.
Don’t be abstract. Write the real stuff. Be honest and detailed.
“Talk when you talk, walk when you walk, and die when you die.” Write when you write.
Hear “You are boring” as distant white laundry flapping in the breeze. Eventually it will dry up and someone miles away will fold it and take it in. Meanwhile you will continue to write.
If I’m afraid, my writing’s bent, untruthful to what is real.
If you want to write a novel, write a novel. If it’s essays you want or short stories, write them. In the process of writing them, you will learn how.
The real life is in writing, not in reading the same ones over and over again for years. We constantly need new insights, visions. We don’t exist in any solid form. There is no permanent truth you can corner in a poem that will satisfy you forever.
But don’t worry about metaphors. Don’t think, “I have to write metaphors to sound literary.” First of all, don’t be literary.
Writing practice softens the heart and mind, helps to keep us flexible so that rigid distinctions between apples and milk, tigers and celery, disappear. We can step through moons right into bears. You will take leaps naturally if you follow your thoughts, because the mind spontaneously takes great leaps.
So perhaps not all obsessions are bad. An obsession for peace is good. But then be peaceful. Don’t just think about it. An obsession for writing is good. But then write. Don’t let it get twisted into drinking. An obsession for chocolate is not good. I know. It’s unhealthy and doesn’t help the world the way peace and writing do.
Give us the flavor. In other words, use details. They are the basic unit of writing.
Employers pay salaries for time. That is the basic commodity that human beings have that is valuable. We exchange our time in life for money. Writers stay with the first step—their time—and feel it is valuable even before they get money for it.
Listening is receptivity. The deeper you can listen, the better you can write. You take in the way things are without judgment, and the next day you can write the truth about the way things are. Jack Kerouac in his list of prose essentials said, “Be submissive to everything. Open. Listening.” He also said, “No time for poetry, but exactly what is.” If you can capture the way things are, that’s all the poetry you’ll ever need.
Basically, if you want to become a good writer, you need to do three things. Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot. And don’t think too much. Just enter the heat of words and sounds and colored sensations and keep your pen moving across the page.
I needed support—not my poetry. I confused the two. I forgot that I am not the poem.
We want honest support and encouragement. When we receive it, we don’t believe it, but we are quick to accept criticism to reinforce our deepest beliefs that, in truth, we are no good and not really writers.
Really stop when someone is complimenting you. Even if it’s painful and you are not used to it, just keep breathing, listen, and let yourself take it in. Feel how good it is. Build up a tolerance for positive, honest support.
our dreams do reoccur. We might as well pay attention to them and act on them. It is a way to penetrate into our lives; otherwise we might drift with our dreams forever.
Writing is not psychology. We do not talk “about” feelings. Instead the writer feels and through her words awakens those feelings in the reader.
When you write, stay in direct connection with the senses and what you are writing about.
As soon as I hear the word about in someone’s writing, it is an automatic alarm. “This story is about life.” Skip that line and go willy-nilly right into life in your writing.
This does not mean you can’t write about something you did not actually experience firsthand; only make sure that you breathe life into it. Otherwise it is two times removed and you are not present.
When we know the name of something, it brings us closer to the ground. It takes the blur out of our mind; it connects us to the earth.
Even miracles are mundane happenings that an awakened mind can see in a fantastic way.
In order to write about it, we have to go to the heart of it and know it, so the ordinary and extraordinary flash before our eyes simultaneously.
We have a responsibility to treat ourselves kindly; then we will treat the world in the same way.
“We are not gossiping cruelly. We are just trying to understand life.” And it is true. We should learn to talk, not with judgment, greed, or envy, but with compassion, wonder, and amazement.
Make a list of all the stories you have told over and over. That’s a lot of writing to be done.
Your ability to love another’s writing means those capabilities are awakened in you. It will only make you bigger; it won’t make you a copy cat.
“They are good and I am good.” That statement gives a lot of space.
Kill the idea of the lone, suffering artist. We suffer anyway as human beings. Don’t make it any harder on yourself.
Forget yourself. Disappear into everything you look at—a street, a glass of water, a cornfield. Everything you feel, become totally that feeling, burn all of yourself with it. Don’t worry—your ego will quickly become nervous and stop such ecstasy. But if you can catch that feeling or smell or sight the moment you are one with it, you probably will have a great poem.
Also, right before you are planning to write, a good preparation is to become an animal. Move slowly, stalking your prey, which is whatever you plan to write about, no matter what else you might be doing at the moment—taking out the garbage, walking to the library, watering the garden. Get all your senses intent. Turn off your logical mind—empty, no thoughts.
Making statements is practice in trusting your own mind, in learning to stand up with your thoughts.
Writing is the act of burning through the fog in your mind. Don’t carry the fog out on paper. Even if you are not sure of something, express it as though you know yourself.
Writing is the act of discovery. You want to discover your relationship with a topic, not the dictionary definition.
You can’t always attack a topic; sometimes it takes a while to come to it.
Learn to write about the ordinary. Give homage to old coffee cups, sparrows, city buses, thin ham sandwiches. Make a list of everything ordinary you can think of. Keep adding to it.
In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write.
Don’t even worry about writing “well”; just writing is heaven.
you can’t rest on your success. Or your failure. “I have written something wonderful.” Good, but it is a new moment. Write something else.
So the world is empty. Things rise and fall for no reason. And what a great opportunity that is! You can start writing again at any minute.
I write because to form a word with your lips and tongue or think a thing and then dare to write it down so you can never take it back is the most powerful thing I know.
What I meant was at some point in our lives we have to be crazy, we have to lose control, step out of our ordinary way of seeing, and learn that the world is not the way we think it is, that it isn’t solid, structured, and forever.
Give yourself tremendous space to wander in, to be utterly lost with no name, and then come back and speak.
Don’t just put in your time. That is not enough. You have to make great effort.
If you are bored for years of writing, it means you are not connecting with yourself and the process.
Rather than following rules, have a friendliness toward existence.
IF YOU FIND you are having trouble writing and nothing seems real, just write about food.
