writing.coffee

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

You're always believing ahead of your evidence. What was the evidence I could write a poem? I just believed it. The most creative thing in us is to believe in a thing.

My writing can be a kind of therapy for me, and I'm sure some of their origins extend well back into my childhood.

If you are hoping to find your self-worth and fulfillment in other peoples' opinion of your writing, you will never find it.

The only rule I have when writing is to try to tell the truth. That doesn't mean you can't exaggerate, edit, rewrite things to make them more dramatic. But emotional truth is what I look for in writing.

And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write – every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing.

Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.

What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn't matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can.

We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

I write because I like to write. I find joy in the texture and tone and rhythm of words. It is a satisfaction like that which follows good and shared love.

The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

My favorite book is my next one. I'm always hoping to make my next book my best one.

It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.

I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good at it.

Write to please just one person.

If you focus on results and finding shortcuts, you'll get impatient. If you focus on the process and doing the right thing, you'll be unstoppable.

Any form of human creativity is a process of doing it and getting better at it…[Writers] don't usually peak in their 20s. It's usually quite a lot later on.