My problem wasn’t that I was unwilling to get out of my comfort zone. My problem was that I wasn’t keeping up with my comfort zone, which kept moving and moving as my life kept moving.
Read MoreIt's not just that no one can read my stuff if I haven’t written it, or that I can’t get paid if I haven’t written it, or that no one will be helped and guided by my stories if I haven’t written them – it’s that I have forgotten and disregarded the actual, moment-to-moment experience of writing.
Read MoreThe only safe place for my mind then is the present. The darker and more hopeless I feel, the more present I must be. If I drift even a little backwards or forwards I fall into a hole with no bottom.
Read MoreMy eyes must stay on the road, and that road is my story, which I travel by finding the next word, and the next word, and the next word.
Read MoreThe artist must understand that what speaks to him in his workroom does not go silent at the dinner table or the grocery store. It cannot go silent, but we can forget how to hear it, believing perhaps that the workroom is some special, holy place, and that our work is a special, holy activity.
Read MoreYou write for connection, for the magic of falling into the full alive dream of a story, but also you come to the page for this very emptiness. You come to the page to understand it.
Read MoreEvery writer has experienced that scene that “wrote itself,” the character that talked her way into your story against your will, or the perfect ending that seemed to be waiting for you while you struggled through the beginning and middle. In my experience, the more you write, the more you experience these “miracles.” Though you might not admit it to anyone but another writer, you have probably come to depend on them.
Read MoreThe words we choose are an expression of a point of view on the story we’re telling and on life itself. Every single word is a choice, after all. Another person simply cannot make choices for me because they have not lived what I’ve lived and seen what I’ve seen and loved who I’ve loved.
Read MoreI 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.
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