1 Decide when in the day (or night) it best suits you to write, and organise your life accordingly. 2 Think with your senses as well as your brain. 3 Honour the miraculousness of the ordinary. 4 Lock different characters/elements in a room and tell them to get on. 5 Remember there is no such […]
Author Alice Munro On Story
Madeleine L’Engle on the 3 Most Important Things for Writers
“I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think […]
Anais Nin on June Miller—& a Rare Radio Interview
“Words and certain languages and certain rhythms belong to certain personalities — the writing takes on the color of the certain personality that I describe.” ~ Anaïs Nin Listen to a rare interview with Anaïs Nin Frank Roberts of KPFK radio interviews Anaïs Nin, following the publication of the first volume of her eponymous diary in 1966. […]
Diane Ackerman on Truly Living Our Lives
“The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat an unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, […]
Tom Robbins on Writing and Making a Fool of Yourself
Joseph Conrad on Fiction, Art and the Power of the Written Word
Fiction — if it at all aspires to be art — appeals to temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the […]