My writer friend: Just how serious are you about it? "It is not enough for a man to feel the divine flame burning in him; unless he goes into the concentrated, slogging business of learning the techniques of expression, his genius will be of no use to anyone." —Oswald Chambers
One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
James Baldwin • Notes of a Native Son
To Jake, the word that comprised the relationship between a writer and their spark was “responsibility.” Once you were in possession of an actual idea, you owed it a debt for having chosen you, and not some other writer, and you paid that debt by getting down to work, not just as a journeyman fabricator of sentences but as an unshrinking artist rea
... See moreJean Hanff Korelitz • The Plot
“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say,
... See moreNone of it will do a damn bit of good if you can't sit down and open the pipeline to your Muse. The artist's journey is about that. Nothing else matters. Nothing else counts.