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Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
‘Arrange whatever pieces come your way’ wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary, and it’s good advice, even when the pieces – a half-remembered conversation, the subtext of a smile – seem at first not to lead anywhere. They can go in a notebook or diary until the meaning becomes clear, perhaps not until months or years later.
Miranda France • The Writing School
I suppose this is what I meant when I wrote what I did, sweet pea, about how it is we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren’t and people we didn’t know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep fa
... See morecheryl strayed • Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice from Dear Sugar
for most of us, our work would benefit from reaching out to others more, trusting more in our readers. I have seen, in many of my students, that the first proof of progress is that their stories become more cognizant of the existence of the reader – more fun, less unnecessarily dense, truer to life, fairer, warmer; they start engaging with issues t... See more
George Saunders • Art vs. Commerce
some of us writers start out wanting to write excellent fiction (or nonfiction, in my case) and then get stuck because that’s . . . the wrong starting point? At the end of the day, the writing is just a vehicle for something else—some feeling about the world or human experience that you want to suggest or precipitate in your readers.