First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life.

In Bird by Bird, the novelist Anne Lamott elegantly captures this rhythm of creation. “You find yourself back at the desk, staring blankly at the pages you filled yesterday. And there on page four is a paragraph with all sorts of life in it, smells and sounds and voices and colors,” she writes. “You don’t care about those first three pages; those y

it was possible to use words to describe the world so that the world seemed plausible.

Many people assume there’s an inherent conflict between creativity and a critical, analytic awareness of the medium you work in. They assume that the creative artist works unconsciously And that knowing too much about matters like grammar and syntax diminishes or blunts creativity. This is nonsense. You don’t need to be an expert in grammar and syn

Beyond the sense of a word is its sensuousness: its sound, its cadence, its spirit. The sounds of peach and mango differ, letting you play in different ways with surrounding words. In turning a phrase, we want the words to build like a jazz riff, with the melodies of one word playing off the melodies of the others.