Here’s why I was glad I went to my first writer’s conference: I learned that professional writers, agents, and editors were real people.
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What I had called imagination was really love, and I can never be more confident than when I am focused on what I love.
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As soon as the alarm went off, and my eyes opened, and my mind oriented to the room and the morning and my wife beside me, my first thought was a list of everything I would do that day. I was like a soldier who’d heard revelry and had to be out of his bunk and in formation by 0600.
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I never want to suffer a moment in my life. I never want to be late, or bored, or angry, or tired, or scared, or depressed, but I do love to tell stories, and I wonder sometimes if I keep throwing myself into the occasional fit of worry or outrage just so I’ll have new material.
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I can’t remember the last time someone asked me what I did. I suspect this is because I began to make peace with the unexplainable, unconditional contentment – began, in fact, to write from it, rather than hoping writing would bring me to it.
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The only time I don’t complain at all is when I’m writing. I simply can’t write and complain. Writing is about what I want on the page, not what I don’t want on the page.
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It is always easier to feel love when you’re with someone, or doing something, or appreciating something, but to really understand love you have to be alone and doing nothing. That’s why the blank page continues to teach me so much about what it means to be human.
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When it comes to taste, you simply couldn’t get it wrong unless you try to live by someone else’s.
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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.
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It'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.
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The 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.
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My 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.
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The 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.
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You 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.
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Every 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.
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The 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.
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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.
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I 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.
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This 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.
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The 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.
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