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

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.

Writing—and this is the big secret—wants to be written.

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

with a product-not-process orientation like this, is it any wonder that the aspiring writer is seized by anxiety?

old friends. Writing makes that possible. Relationships are like landscapes: they are beautiful, and the light we see them by changes with the seasons.

If we let ourselves notice, writing feels collaborative.

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

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

The “if-I-had-time” lie is a convenient way to ignore the fact that novels require being written and that writing happens a sentence at a time. Sentences can happen in a moment. Enough stolen moments, enough stolen sentences, and a novel is born—without the luxury of time.