[B]eauty impels us to pay a certain kind of attention. It startles you and prompts you to cast off the self-centered tendency to always be imposing your opinions on things. It prompts you to stop in your tracks, take a breath and open yourself up so that you can receive what it is offering, often with a kind of childlike awe and reverence. It trains you to see the world in a more patient, just and humble way. In “The Sovereignty of Good,” the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch writes that “virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”

David Brooks

by Sarah Ruhl and from the Jan/Feb 2023 Poets & Writers.

Sometime I forget why I should keep writing. I hope you make a list of your own. Here is mine.

Write for God. The cave. The envelope.

Write for your mother. Your father. Your friend who is sick.

Write for the future. Write for the past. Write for the present, but sideways.

Write for the child who saw cruelty, and for those dispossessed of language.

Write for your daughter. Write for your son. If they don’t exist, write for the dream of them.

Write for your uncle to weep, for your aunt to laugh. For your babysitter to cover her face with recognition.

Write for the church you walked past with a sign that read: THEATER AT SACRAMENT. And you misread it as: THEATER AS SACRAMENT.

Write for the accountants whose eyes are too tired at night for numbers. For the farmers who grow your corn.

Write for your teachers. Write for every single hour they left off writing their own sentences so that they could read yours.

Write to thank the books you love.

Write for yourself.

Write for God. The cave. And the envelope.

“I usually had very few friends, and I was lonely,” [Octavia E.] Butler said. “But when I wrote, I wasn’t.” 

In other words, people naturally create stories, breaking up those clock-ticking seconds and replacing them with dramatic rising action, heart-stopping climaxes, and resolutions. Storytellers “lengthen time” with focus and careful description and contract time with descriptive brevity, summary, or even absence. The simple choice of when to start and when to stop the story imposes significance and value on certain events and diminishes others.

Kylie Nielson Turley

“Equally important, the scene is required for what it does to the reader’s emotional involvement with these two people. As they become friends, they win our friendship. As they impress each other with their warmth and generosity, they impress us as well” (107).

            –Wayne Booth on E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India

Some writers claim to extrude a book at an even rate like toothpaste from a tube, or to build a story like a wall, so many feet per day. They sit at their desk and knock off their word quota, then frisk into their leisured evening, preening themselves. This is so alien to me that it might be another trade entirely. Writing lectures or reviews – any kind of non-fiction – seems to me a job like any job: allocate your time, marshal your resources, just get on with it. But fiction makes me the servant of a process that has no clear beginning and end or method of measuring achievement. I don’t write in sequence. I may have a dozen versions of a single scene. I might spend a week threading an image through a story, but moving the narrative not an inch. A book grows according to a subtle and deep-laid plan. At the end, I see what the plan was.

Hilary Mantel

It’s appropriate to pause and say that the writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.… The not knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.… Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.

~Donald Barthelme, “Not-knowing”

The scene comes first, an idea of a character in a place. It’s visual, it’s Technicolor—something I see in a vague way. Then sentence by sentence into the breach.

Elisa Gabber quoting Don DeLillo

[F]or the practicing artist, influence requires a more active engagement. We must work to be influenced, not merely wait.

~ Margot Livesay

Writing gives me such enormous pleasure, and I’m a much happier (and therefore nicer) person when I’m doing it. There’s a place in my head that I go to when I write and it’s so rich and unexpected – and scary sometimes – but never ever dull. I first went there when I was seven and I wrote a poem which startled me a bit because it felt like someone else had written it. The adrenaline rush that gave me was incredible and I wanted more. These days, maybe because I can now access that place quite easily, writing feels like something I simply could not live without. It is a joyous thing. I feel very lucky to be paid to do it, but even if I’d never been published, I think I’d still be writing. I love being read, but the person I’m really always writing for is me.

-Julie Myerson