If you're hungry for more blog posts, Feedspot.com can fix you up. This page is courtesy of Anuj Agarwal. Go check 'em out.
If you're hungry for more blog posts, Feedspot.com can fix you up. This page is courtesy of Anuj Agarwal. Go check 'em out.
Critics are people who sit on the mountaintop and look down on the battlefield. When the fighting is finished, they take it upon themselves to come down from the mountain and shoot the survivors.
It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil, trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.
The fact is, I don’t know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.
It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.
Reading and weeping opens the door to one’s heart, but writing and weeping opens the window to one’s soul.
No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.
Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

























