Every once in a while someone says, 'You can't really learn anything, if you're really a writer then you wouldn't need to do it.' But I think what people need is the sense of not being alone. They go to MFA programs to be part of a community of people who care, and then you start caring about your friend who is trying to edit a magazine and your other friend who is stuck in the middle of her poem. There you have all kinds of things to worry about besides your own success.
We have to diversify, we have to find work we can do that helps other people while helping ourselves, work that has to do with writing that isn't necessarily just writing saleable novels or getting huge advances.
Somehow we have to detach from feeling as though money is a quick and easy standard by which we can gauge how well we're doing.
Whoever would write books? It's suffering as well as greatly satisfying. And certainly there's suffering in the sense that you don't know for a long time how to do it.
I think you have to remember that writing is hard; my first editor used to say that to me.
The main thing is to explain to yourself that everybody suffers.
There are so many different ways, most of them helpful and legal, to get yourself into a state of mind where writing is possible. It's going to be different for each person.
I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.
I find that I get very excited about what my students are up to and that I get to be the hurdle they need to jump over.
Teaching is very important to me, and it has become more important as I get older.
I just like doing it, I like writing.
You may be somebody who writes best for a small press that doesn't pay very well, but you might have a fascinating and intricate style that might not appeal to as many readers but will be incredibly meaningful to the readers you have. Truly, that's as wonderful if not more wonderful.
Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.
We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.
I actually think it's sometimes easier for the control freaks to let loose.
I remember I had had one woman who had three or four kids, and some of them were having problems. I said, 'Maybe you could go write somewhere else, away from your house.' And sure enough, all kinds of wonderful stuff emerged. She was keeping too much charge of herself because she couldn't stop being a mother when she was in the house. You have to find your own way of letting loose, if you're one of those people.
Sometimes it's interesting to see what people who have too much control need to do to write freely.
For some people, it's very easy to be spontaneous and they can pour out the most wonderful stuff. But it's really hard to exert control over it, to think, 'Well, this could be different. This could go in the opposite order, there could be more here and less there.' For other people, it's much easier to have rules and a methodology, but much harder to let loose and allow their feelings to come pouring out on the page. They're more shy or they're just more distant from their emotions. I think everybody starts with one or the other.
Even murderers, I suppose, experience the loss of car keys the way the rest of us do. I mean, how can they not? Once you make this person scramble around the house looking for her car keys and finally find them, get in the car, and run into traffic, we can identify with her enough that when she stops the car and pulls the gun out of her purse and heads in to kill somebody, we'll be with her as much as is possible.
Sometimes people want to know how to write a story from the point of view of a murderer and make her sympathetic. I think the answer is that you start by having her look for her car keys, because everybody knows what it's like.
I had never written about what it's like to live the life of a writer, and I had never read a book that combined talking about the life of writing and how you can do it, how you can stand it, how you can emotionally manage it, with the choices that we all make on the page.
The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.
I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.
There seems to be a tremendous desire among many people now to know authors and how they work, to know what's autobiographical and what isn't.
I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.
