Write Fearlessly. Write Within Yourself
I had no idea what anyone else liked. I never have. I know what I like; I know what excites me and what holds my attention. Everyone else’s desires and curiosities, my friends and family included, remain necessarily mysterious to me. What other people like, ultimately, is none of my business.
Read MoreI often feel a twinge of victim-hood whenever I’m misunderstood. “I’m innocent!” I think. “You and your muddled thinking are guilty.” But in all my years of writing and talking, I’ve never once figured out how to make anyone understand me. All I can do is try to be clearer and more honest.
Read MoreThis is what desperation does to me. In its throes I am stricken with a hallucinatory blindness so that all I can see is what I don’t want. I don’t know how to not create what I don’t want. And so I don’t know what to do, and so I think, “I can’t do this,” and so it doesn’t happen.
Read MoreThe longer I have lived as an artist, the more I have come to believe that my sustained happiness and success depends not on what I make or share but on what I believe about myself when I am not making or sharing anything.
Read MoreEveryone’s defining success for themselves. It’s like a game we’re all playing in which each of us gets to decide whether we’ve won or lost.
Read MoreThe deepest despair I have known grew out of the belief that none of my choices mattered, as if my life is nothing but the path of a pinball bounced through the universe by fate and physics.
Read MoreThis problem of the truth feeling like a lie followed me often, particularly with my writing career. It too felt like a kind of lie sometimes, a mirage of an idea that existed only in my mind.
Read MoreI may crave the moment I can close the door to my workroom and sit quietly at my desk and once again enter the dream of the story I have been telling, but I must never mistake this experience for loneliness. Storytellers are never alone, although we are by ourselves.
Read MoreI wouldn’t let myself write about these things I didn’t understand but wanted to understand. I suppose I was afraid I would write about them and that other people would either not get what I meant or not care, and then there I’d be, stranded forever on an island of inscrutable thought.
Read MoreIf you don’t actually want to play the game, you will not get any better at it, and you will not care about focus or grace or technique. You will look at the game and think, “This is all made up. The points aren’t real, nothing real is won or lost, and the rules can be changed as quickly as we change our minds. It’s all pretend.”
Read MoreLike bad book reviews, the past and all its suffering isn’t going anywhere. It will always be. So right now, in this moment, I have to decide what I actually believe about myself and all the other people in the world – every single living and dead one of us.
Read MoreThere is no room for doubt in writing or in friendship. I cannot both doubt the value of a story and see the value of a story.
Read MoreUp 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.
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