Write Fearlessly. Write Within Yourself
Up until that moment I had believed that marketing, and sales in general, was about either knowing what other people liked or somehow manipulating someone into liking what I’d written. I have no idea what other people like and I have no idea how to make anyone do anything.
Read MoreThe creative mind, whether it’s reading or writing, can take any form. Its only limitation is perception. If we can see it, if we can imagine it, we can become it, just as water can fill any vessel.
Read MoreI never begin a story until I have something I appreciate enough to share with other people. It is nice when someone appreciates it too, but the reader’s appreciation can never replace mine.
Read MoreAfter much practice, I have learned to enjoy the waiting necessary to write anything. You can’t always be in the middle of writing a sentence, and you can’t always be finding your way into the next sentence you know you want to write.
Read MoreThe Inspiration Store never closes, and all it’s goods are free. All I have to pay is attention. If I turn inspiration into something rare, something reserved for the few or the talented or the lucky, I’ll wait and wait and wait, avoiding the desk for fear of failure, until I fall into a sleep of despair.
Read MoreI’ve been teaching memoir for several years, and I’ve found that every student who comes to my class has an interesting story to tell. Those stories always involve suffering. Sometimes the source of that suffering seems obvious, like alcoholism or growing up very poor, and sometimes it seems subtler, like enduring a dying marriage or raising a troubled child.
Read MoreThere is a very big difference between writing in the genre you were meant to write in and writing in a genre you think will be the most lucrative, just as there is a big difference between wearing a pair of shoes that fit and a pair of shoes that are a half-size too small.
Read MoreThe audience can be like a competitor. My ideas for stories begin where there is no thought of a reader. I am completely alone with these ideas as I try to find them in a way that they will make sense to me.
Read MoreI have a troublesome habit of wishing I was someone else. The problem with this habit is that it has disguised itself as idle fantasy.
Read MoreI was giving a talk recently to a group of local parents. Good public speaker that I am, I have trained myself to scan the faces of the entire crowd. On this evening I noticed one woman sitting dead center to me. From word one, she was yawning.
Read MoreBefore I could have any success as a writer I had to get over the idea that in order to do so I had to be special. From the outside, this seemed empirically, quantifiably true. I read some writers whose work reminded me why life was worth living, who could snap me to attention with one sentence, who seemed to write with such clarity that I could recognize myself in their stories. Other writers bored me, or irritated me, or seemed to be telling stories that somehow I’d already heard.
Read MoreA few years ago I went on a run of interviewing authors on my podcast who had had near death experiences – or NDEs, as they’re frequently known. Though the stories of what these authors experienced beyond the veil of death varied, the impact that experience had on their lives was consistent.
Read MoreI’ve been telling stories since I learned to talk, and I have learned in that time that no matter how good a story might be I cannot tell it compellingly or authoritatively until I’m lined up with it.
Read MoreWhether you call yourself a writer or not, you’re a storyteller. Stories are how we communicate with each other, and how we understand the world and ourselves. And perhaps more importantly, we are also all living in a kind of storybook of our own creation, filled with our own villains and heroes, our own monsters and saints, and our own idea of whether this story can end happily or not.
Read MoreI studied philosophy for the first time when I was a freshman in college. Before then, the most I knew about philosophers was from the Monty Python’s Philosopher’s Song. After a few months of study I had an epiphany. “All philosophers do,” I realized, “is look around at the world and then write down what they think about it. Why read what other people think? Why not write down what I think?”
Read MoreMichelangelo supposedly said of his sculpture “David” that he did not carve the figure but released it from the marble. I’ve heard a number of writers quote this when talking about finding their stories – specifically fiction. It is a helpful way to look at writing, I think: the view that the stories we want to tell already exist, and we just need to put them into a form that everyone can see.
Read MoreFor a short time in my early twenties I thought I might want to be an actor. I was performing in a show I’d written with my brother, and I became increasingly interested in how you find and then stay in character. Even though it was a sketch comedy show and my characters were mostly clownish versions of myself, there was still a difference between what I inhabited on stage and what I inhabited offstage. I wanted the character to be as real as I was; I didn’t want the audience to ever see me “acting.”
Read MoreThe first writer I ever heard give a talk was Larry McMurtry, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning epic Lonesome Dove I had devoured in a particularly fallow week while drifting jobless through the suburban wastes of Glendale, CA. I had since moved to Seattle where my then fiancé and I went to see him at the University of Washington. I was twenty-five, and just begun my first novel.
Read MoreI’ve noticed that if I’m flipping through television channels looking for something to watch, and I happen on a scene where a man has a gun pointed at someone’s face, I usually pause in my flipping. The same is true if I land on a scene of a man and woman in the act. In both cases I know absolutely nothing about the context for what I am seeing. I don’t know if the man with the gun is a villain or a hero, if he’s crazed or courageous; I also don’t if the man and the woman are in love or if they’ve just met at a bus stop. All I know is that someone might die, or that two people are having sex.
Read MoreMy younger brother and I were both interested as boys in the arts, but whereas I was drawn to the page he was drawn to the stage and eventually the screen. We were talking about our separate choices one day, and he admitted he was somewhat puzzled by mine. “I don’t get it, Bill,” he said. “With books all you get are words.”
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