The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life

how do we stay both small enough and big enough to create?

I take my writer out for treats, that I buy it expensive coffee concoctions with foam like clouds. I take my writer on train rides to write and admire the view. I buy my writer journals, race-along-pens, an embroidered writing chair that I place by the window with good light.

We must be small enough, humble enough, to always be a beginner, an observer. We must be open to experience, new experience, new sources of knowledge and insight, while still staying grounded in the fact that what we already know and have done is also estimable, also important. In short, we must stay big enough to recognize that any individual crit

Don’t people realize that fame is no talisman against human pain?

have learned that as far as writing goes, my logic brain is for second drafts.

One thing I know about writing is that you do not have to be in the mood to do it.

I think it’s anticipation. I think it’s savoring.

logic becomes the field marshal and emotion is kept at bay.

I believe that what we want to write wants to be written. I believe that as I have an impulse to create, the something I want to create has an impulse to want to be born. My job, then, is to show up on the page and let that something move through me. In a sense, what wants to be written is none of my business.