Jenny Zhang on writing the secret languages inside your head
thecreativeindependent.com
Jenny Zhang on writing the secret languages inside your head
This raises immediately the question of whom one is writing ‘for’. My own, short answer is that I have never had a reader in mind. I have ideas, people, events, shapes, and I write ‘for’ those things, and hope that the completed work will be of interest to others.
Salman Rushdie • Salman Rushdie · Imaginary Homelands
The limits of that language—shared assumptions of class, culture, education, ethics—both focus and shrink the scope of the fiction.
Ursula K. Le Guin • The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
a writer is a writer, no matter what sort of work she’s doing, as long as she is thinking, still, like a writer: observing and mentally composing and watching the world with curiosity. Writing is a lovely, life-affirming thing to do, even if the world never rewards us for it, or never rewards us enough to allow us to make it the main thing in our l... See more
George Saunders • Art vs. Commerce
Writer George Saunders calls this “achieving the iconic space,” and it’s what he’s after when he meets his creative writing students. “They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space” — the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what m... See more