Write for Your Life

Anne’s diary is also instructive about how writing, for anyone, for everyone, for you and for me, can normalize the abnormal and feed the spirit, whether during exceptional moments of history or just ordinary moments of everyday life.

“That physical act is what makes a poem come alive,” he says. “And unlike other writing, a poem has a physical shape, a physical dimension on the page. It does not have the block arrangement of prose.”

Where are the letters those of us going through a crisis today will write that our own children will find in a cedar chest? Is the computer the cedar chest of the future, and how precisely will our descendants be able to pore over the contents?

if you’ve gotten your own voice down on the page, you will read aloud and think: “Yep, that’s it. That’s me.”

I think we could argue that a lot of what winds up online is freewriting, given its stream of consciousness and disregard for rereading and revision.

“There aren’t going to be any drafts. They will disappear inside the computer.”

A story on paper seemed real. A story that disappeared into a big box did not.

everyone has a voice.

that work that has been edited and then revised is, in my experience, notably better than work that has not. But the problem for students, particularly students who are used to doing well, is that having a paper handed back for another go-round implies not a desire for improvement but a verdict of failure.