Writers Workshop Quotes

You don't need to wait for inspiration to write. It's easier to be inspired while writing than while not writing...

And what about those [writers' workshop] critiques, by the way? How valuable are they? Not very, in my experience, sorry. A lot of them are maddeningly vague. I love the feeling of Peter's story, someone may say. It had something... a sense of I don't know... there's a loving kind of you know... I can't exactly describe it.... It seems to occur to few of the attendees that if you have a feeling you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.

It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character.

From my writer's workshop, "Know when it's time to put everything you've got on the page. Then, rip open a vein and do it!

On writers' workshops: "It is the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster's shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.

It is no use thinking that writing of poems – the actual writing – can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude.

[A writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

Reading any novel, good or mediocre, is a workshop for a writer.

..English teachers often take a right-wrong stance. I'd rather my students take a thinking stance.

If you want help in starting to write memoirs, you don't want to fall into the clutches of a famous writer who has been hired to teach at a writing workshop solely because of his name's ability to attract students, rather than because of any teaching skill. You should not have to grapple with someone who secretly thinks you should be writing about his life rather than your own.

How come you write the way you do?” an apprentice writer in my Johns Hopkins workshop once disingenuously asked Donald Barthelme, who was visiting. Without missing a beat, Don replied, “Because Samuel Beckett was already writing the way he does.” Asked another, smiling but serious, “How can we become better writers than we are?” “Well," DB advised, “for starters, read through the whole history of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics up through last semester. That might help.” “But Coach Barth has already advised us to read all of literature, from Gilgamesh up through last semester...” “That, too,” Donald affirmed, and twinkled that shrewd Amish-farmer-from-West-11th-Street twinkle of his. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping. Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.

I hate to be a nag, but you have got to read. Like most authors, I run creative writing workshops from time to time, and speak, when invited to writers' circles and at summer schools, and I'm continually amazed at the number of would-be writers who scarcely read. For ideas to germinate and proliferate there has to be fertile ground to sow them in, and for the ground to be fertile it must be mulched with observation, imagination, and other writing.

No matter what, just let them write every day,even if you're not sure what to teach, just let them write. They'll do fine." -Lisa Cleaveland's words for her long-term substitute teacher.

Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you read, you are limiting yourself. You need to get a good overall sense of English literary history, so you can write out of that knowledge.

Collaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wonderful invention. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had.

Let failure be your workshop. See it for what is is: the world walking you through a tough but necessary semester, free of tuition. (from Workbook)

For a marginalized writer writing to a normative audience, the writer has to be wary of normative craft. Much of what we learn about craft (about the expectations we are supposed to consider) implies a straight, white, cis, able (etc.) audience. It is easy to forget who we are writing for if we do not keep it a conscious consideration, and the default is not universal, but privileged.

What we call craft is in fact nothing more or less than a set of expectations. Those expectations are shaped by workshop, by reading, by awards and gatekeepers, by biases about whose stories matter and how they should be told. How we engage with craft expectations is what we can control as writers. The more we know about the context of those expectations, the more consciously we can engage with them.

Incredibly, there are people—smart people—who think a prim disdain for drama is somehow a sign of “good taste.” It is more often the reverse: a lamentable insensitivity to the essence of the art, a failure to “get it” on the most essential level. It is more often a sign not of good taste but of artistic insecurity. Not knowing how far to go, the writer goes nowhere. Lifelessness is not a form of elegance you should pursue.

We live in a time when the values of courage and honesty, particularly for women writers, equate to confessing only the darkest, most painful parts of our lives. "How brave you are," my students say to each other over workshop tables, "to expose that." Meaning, to uncover this family secret or that heinous act or to openly confront the demons of alcoholism, promiscuity, substance abuse, incest, infidelity, illness, betrayal....I have also wrestled many dark angels, and continue to do so, so I acknowledge the price such writing exacts. But more and more I have come to respect the honesty and courage required to recognize the bright angels when they appear in our memory, and to allow them equal space in our narratives.

am bringing back a report from the Dark Ages. In those days, the workshop still fostered the Cult of Insanity which has played such a big part in the mythology of being a writer and artist—that misery, mental illness, drug addiction, and alcoholism were proof of your sensitivity and talent. Or to put it another way, the worse you were, the better you were. We still believed in Papa in those days, in the righteous dominance of masculinity. We believed the hallmark of literary greatness was going to war, racking up a long string of wives, and then blowing your head off in Idaho.

My advice for aspiring writers is simply this: NEVER GIVE UP. Do not let anyone tell you that you cannot achieve your dreams. If you want to be a writer, do it! Study hard to show that you have a passion for it. Read as many books as you possibly can. Attend workshops. Take classes that focus on English and writing skills. Research. Write everyday; even if it's on little napkins at restaurants. Every idea starts somewhere. Never let anyone steal your aspirations. You can do this. Just breathe and write. The rest will come to follow.

Productivity is the only path to confidence.

I’ve learned to write by mimicking other writers. It’s the way we learned to speak—reproducing sounds—and it’s the way, I think, to learn how to write.

If it sounds good, it is good.

A failed short story is a few weeks of fruitless work; a failed novel is a dead child.

A workshop should not participate in the binding but in freeing the writer from the culturally regulated boundaries of what it is possible to say and how it is possible to say it.

We must reject the mystification/mythification of creative writing. The mystical writer uses the myth of his genius to gain power.

Since you have no choice but to begin in uncertainty, you must learn to tolerate uncertainty and, if possible, to turn it into excitement.

I was never happier than on the nights we stayed home, lying on the living room rug. We talked about classes and poetry and politics and sex. Neither of us were in love with the Iowa Writers' Workshop, but it didn't really matter because we had no place else to go. What we had was the little home we made together, our life in the ugly green duplex. We lived next door to a single mother named Nancy Tate who was generous in all matters. She would drive us to the grocery store and give us menthol cigarettes and come over late at night after her son was asleep to sit in our kitchen and drink wine and talk about Hegel and Marx. Iowa City in the eighties was never going to be Paris in the twenties, but we gave it our best shot.

I’ve always thought that a close-reading course should at least be a companion, if not an alternative, to the writing workshop. Though it also doles out praise, the workshop most often focuses on what a writer has done wrong, what needs to be fixed, cut, or augmented. Whereas reading a masterpiece can inspire us by showing us how a writer does something brilliantly.

...one of the main purposes of our assesment is to find evidence of the children using these ideas to make decisions about their writing work each day, catching them in the act [of writing].

People like to stop reading when they’ve finished a chapter, not in the middle of a chapter. This is probably the last thing they’ll tell you at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, but it’s a reality

I like blank paper. To meet people I find interesting. Writing puts me into a world that has not been written yet. I spend much of my time contemplating love and death. When I am writing a surge of complete happiness takes over. To make readers hear the sound of their own heartbeats, that sound that whispers up to us: you are alive. When I manage to turn pages and pages of crap into a little bit of art, I feel like that girl in the Diamonds Are Forever ad. Writing gives me permission to be a child and to play with words the way that children play with blocks or twigs or mud. Writing makes me a god, each new page enabling me to create and destroy as many worlds as I please. It allows me to spy on my neighbors. It’s the only socially acceptable way to be a compulsive liar. I want to cleanse the past. To discover, to express, to celebrate, to acknowledge, to witness, to remember who I am. I find out what might have been, what should have happened, and what I fear will happen. It’s a means of asking questions, though the answers may be as puzzling as a rune. This question drives me crazy. There is nothing else I want to do more. My soul will not be still until the words are written on paper. Because I can. Because I must. I can’t not. If I don’t I will explode. I want to be good at something and I’ve tried everything else.

The best way to prepare for life is a combination of formal traditional education, reading, seminars, and workshops, coupled with experience as well as tapping into the knowledge of experienced people.

...what really makes for readability is not clarity but attitude: the attitude of your prose toward out elusive friend the Reader and the role you invent for that invented being in your invented world.

It was a heated workshop,” I say. “Skylar Zhao is a talented writer, but she doesn’t know how to take criticism. I wonder, actually, if this is the first time she’s had to confront the fact that her writing isn’t as wonderful as she thinks it is.

Every mini lesson should end with students envisioning a new possibility for their work, and the key to successful minilessons is helping the group of students sitting in front of us to envision the difference this lesson might make in their work

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

for oxygen with our gills. (At this stage, by the way, we’re not even thinking about quality. The idea that you and I might eventually produce something—a book, a film, a start-up—worthy of the attention of another human being… that’s so far off, we can’t even conceive of it.) What we’re doing in fact is learning (teaching ourselves, because they don’t have courses in this stuff at the Wharton School or the Iowa Writers’ Workshop) how to manage our emotions, control our impulse to self-sabotage, and keep on truckin’ in the face of adversity.

The way—the only way—to “find” your story is to tell it. Nobody in the whole world has ever before told the story you are about to tell. You yourself have never told it to anyone, not even to yourself. You may have lots of intuitions about what the story is going to be, and you may even have a sort of summary overview of it. These are good and useful things to have; they are fine places to start. They are not enough. Until you actually tell the story, the whole story, it will be nothing but smoke. Moreover, you probably will not tell the story exactly right the first time you try. You'll make wrong turns, use the wrong key, or use the right key in the wrong door. After all, you have nobody to guide you. If you are like most people, you will have to tell this story more than once—maybe even several times—before you really get it down.

WORKSHOP 1. Read your writing aloud to a friend. Ask, “Does this sound like me?” Discuss the response. 2. After rereading your work, make a list of adjectives that define your voice, such as heavy or aggressive, ludicrous or tentative. Now try to identify the evidence in your writing that led you to these conclusions. 3. Read a draft of a story aloud. Can you hear problems in the story that you could not see? 4. Save the work of writers whose voices appeal to you. Consider why you admire the voice of a particular writer. How is it like your voice? How is it different? In a piece of freewriting, imitate that voice.

EVERY WEDNESDAY, I teach an introductory fiction workshop at Harvard University, and on the first day of class I pass out a bullet-pointed list of things the students should try hard to avoid. Don’t start a story with an alarm clock going off. Don’t end a story with the whole shebang having been a suicide note. Don’t use flashy dialogue tags like intoned or queried or, God forbid, ejaculated. Twelve unbearably gifted students are sitting around the table, and they appreciate having such perimeters established. With each variable the list isolates, their imaginations soar higher. They smile and nod. The mood in the room is congenial, almost festive with learning. I feel like a very effective teacher; I can practically hear my course-evaluation scores hitting the roof. Then, when the students reach the last point on the list, the mood shifts. Some of them squint at the words as if their vision has gone blurry; others ask their neighbors for clarification. The neighbor will shake her head, looking pale and dejected, as if the last point confirms that she should have opted for that aseptic-surgery class where you operate on a fetal pig. The last point is: Don’t Write What You Know. The idea panics them for two reasons. First, like all writers, the students have been encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, for as long as they can remember, to write what they know, so the prospect of abandoning that approach now is disorienting. Second, they know an awful lot. In recent workshops, my students have included Iraq War veterans, professional athletes, a minister, a circus clown, a woman with a pet miniature elephant, and gobs of certified geniuses. They are endlessly interesting people, their lives brimming with uniquely compelling experiences, and too often they believe those experiences are what equip them to be writers. Encouraging them not to write what they know sounds as wrongheaded as a football coach telling a quarterback with a bazooka of a right arm to ride the bench. For them, the advice is confusing and heartbreaking, maybe even insulting. For me, it’s the difference between fiction that matters only to those who know the author and fiction that, well, matters.

I wrote two five-page short stories, two five-page epics, to audition for my college's creative writing workshops, and was turned down both times. I was crushed, but in retrospect it was perfect training for being a writer. You can keep ‘write what you know’—for a true apprenticeship, internalize the world’s indifference and accept rejection and failure into your very soul.

I am indebted to the following colleagues for their advice, assistance, or support: Dr. Alfred Lerner, Dori Vakis, Robin Heck, Dr. Todd Dray, Dr. Robert Tull, and Dr. Sandy Chun. Thanks also to Lynette Parker of East San Jose Community Law Center for her advice about adoption procedures, and to Mr. Daoud Wahab for sharing his experiences in Afghanistan with me. I am grateful to my dear friend Tamim Ansary for his guidance and support and to the gang at the San Francisco Writers Workshop for their feedback and encouragement. I want to thank my father, my oldest friend and the inspiration for all that is noble in Baba; my mother who prayed for me and did nazr at every stage of this book’s writing; my aunt for buying me books when I was young. Thanks go out to Ali, Sandy, Daoud

Use every mistake. The inarticulate parts point to where you must make the words say exactly what you mean. The ragged parts point to what you must polish. The gaping holes tell you what has to be filled. The dull parts tell you unfailingly what must be cut. The blank spots show exactly what you must go out and find. These are infallible guides, and though they talk tough, they are your friends.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and

Attempted Theory #1: Hey, back to our initial question. Perhaps this is the big reason why we write fiction—as a way of understanding ourselves and the world around us. The fiction writer takes a fragment of reality and examines it from several angles until it starts to make some damn sense. By focusing life through the lens of fiction, truths are revealed and magnified and understood. Order is made from chaos. It’s like therapy but cheaper and more fun, and perhaps even more effective.

Ladies and gentlemen, I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing. Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

The argument that one should know the rules before breaking them is really an argument about who gets to make the rules, whose rules get to be the norms and determine the exceptions. To teach the writer from a “query” culture to use “ask” is not to teach her how to write better but to teach her whose writing is better. Writing that follows nondominant cultural standards is often treated as if it is “breaking the rules,” but why one set of rules and not another? What is official always has to do with power.

That yes you commit to as reader and writer is the current that hums through all the work. Of course, you might say yes and then come up against an iceberg. No, you suddenly say definitively. And there you are. What do you do next? I can’t answer that for you, but I do know you eventually have to do something—or freeze to death. See if you can chip away at even a little of the mass in front of you—or try standing up on it. Does it support you? In a weeklong cold winter workshop in Taos I read aloud this passage from Richard Nelson’s The Island Within: The first section of road follows the bay’s edge, behind a strip of tall, leafless alders. When we’re about halfway around, a bald eagle in dark, youthful plumage sails down to a fish carcass on the beach just ahead. He seems careless or unafraid—quite different from the timid, sharp-eyed elders—so I leash Shungnak to the bike, drop my pack, and try to sneak in for a closer look. Using a driftwood pile as a screen, I stalk within fifty feet of the bird, but he spots me peering out between the logs.

One of my writing students sent me an article about Kincaid in The New York Times: “I’m not writing for anyone at all,” Ms. Kincaid said. “I’m writing out of desperation. I felt compelled to write to make sense of it to myself—so I don’t end up saying peculiar things like ‘I’m black and I’m proud.’ I write so I don’t end up as a set of slogans and clichés.” That is exactly what writing is supposed to do—take us into the real texture of life—no generalizations. Why did I assign Kincaid’s book to my Taos workshop? I guess I hoped people would make a leap from Antigua to my hometown. Yes, the mountains are gorgeous and we have a rich tricultural society. We don’t have the same problems as Antigua, but I wanted my students to be more than casual tourists buying tee-shirts and dripping with turquoise. I wanted them to look deeper. Understanding engenders care. I wanted them to care about Taos. But something else, too. I wanted them to experience that passion and vision are as important to nonfiction as to fiction, that nonfiction can be as much an act of imagination and exploration and discovery as fiction or poetry—and that exciting language is part of its power.

Film and television have convinced too many writers that heaps of dialogue make novels more like movies and therefore good. This is an amateur's fantasy, and it has induced some writers to surrender the few advantages they have over cinematic storytelling. The moviemaker is stuck with what the camera can see and the microphone can hear. You have more freedom. You can summarize situations. You can forthrightly give us people's histories. You can concentrate ten years into ten words. You can move anywhere you like outside real time. You can tell us—just tell us—what people are thinking and feeling. Yes, abundant dialogue can lighten a story, make it more readable and sparkle with wonders. But it is pitiably inadequate before what it is not suited to do.

It is precisely in that relationship to the Reader that you will find most of the classic faults of style: pretension, condescension, servility, obscurantism, grandiosity, vulgarity, and the like--even academicism. That's why most faults of style can be described in language relevant to human relations. Is your style frank and open...does it have some understated agenda...is it out to prove something it does not or cannot admit...is it trying to impress...show off...is it kissing up...groveling...maybe just a tad passive-aggressive, with a mumbling half-audible voice that is unwilling to explain...is it trying to convince...overwhelm...help...seduce...give pleasure...inflict pain...There is no area of the writer's work that is more responsive to the psychology of human connection than style.

A PhD student approached me after a writing workshop to recount his tale of woe. “I write these messy, incoherent first drafts,” he lamented. “They’re absolutely awful! Then I have to work on them for hours and hours to bash them into shape. It’s such a frustrating process, and so discouraging. My PhD adviser is a really good writer; she makes it all look so easy. I wish I were more like her.” I didn’t get a chance to interview the student’s supervisor; but if I had, I can guess what she might have told me. Probably something like this: “I write these messy, incoherent first drafts—they’re absolutely awful! Then I have to work on them for hours and hours to bash them into shape. Writing can be a hard and frustrating process, but for the most part, I really enjoy the challenge of honing and polishing my sentences until I get them just right.” Same story, different spin.

Creatures are made in their varying ways images of God without their own collaboration or even consent. It is not so that they become sons of God. And the likeness they receive by sonship is not that of images or portraits. It is in one way more than likeness, for it is unison or unity with God in will; but this is consistent with all the differences we have been considering. Hence, as a better writer has said, our imitation of God in this life—that is, our willed imitation as distinct from any of the likenesses which He has impressed upon our natures or states—must be an imitation of God incarnate: our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions, the lack of all peace and privacy, the interruptions. For this, so strangely unlike anything we can attribute to the Divine life in itself, is apparently not only like, but is, the Divine life operating under human conditions.

Richard Durham was a black writer whose credits in radio would run a gamut from Irna Phillips serials to prestige plays for such as The CBS Radio Workshop. But in Destination Freedom Durham wrote from the heart. Anger simmers at the foundation of these shows, rising occasionally to a wail of agony and torment. On no other show was the term “Jim Crow” used as an adjective, if at all: nowhere else could be heard the actual voices of black actors giving life to a real black environment. There were no buffoons or toadies in Durham’s plays: there were heroes and villains, girlfriends and lovers, mothers, fathers, brutes; there were kids named Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, who bucked the tide and became kings in places named Madison Square Garden and Ebbets Field. The early historical dramas soon gave way to a more contemporary theme: the black man’s struggle in a modern racist society. Shows on Denmark Vesey, Frederick Douglass, and George Washington Carver gave way to Richard Wright’s Black Boy and the lives of Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, and Nat King Cole. The Tiger Hunt was a war story, of a black tank battalion; Last Letter Home told of black pilots in World War II. The stories pulled no punches in their execution of the common theme, making Destination Freedom not only the most powerful but the only show of its kind.

Expect writers to do more than sit and study the works of those they hope to emulate. Encourage them to cut mentor texts open—physically.

At that same anthology workshop, award-winning romance writer Anthea Lawson (who also writes fantasy as the bestselling Anthea Sharp) told me about a successful bundle that she has done.

Inspiration and confidence and conviction and craft and knowledge are not what make writing possible. It's exactly the other way around. Writing makes them possible.

But”—you may say—“I don't even know my story yet.” My answer is: “Of course you don't know your story yet.” You are the very first person to tell this story ever, anywhere in the whole world, and you cannot know a story until it has been told. First you tell it; then you know it. It is not the other way around. That may sound illogical, but to the narrating mind, it is logic itself. Stories make themselves known, they reveal themselves—even to their tellers—only by being told. You may ask how on earth you can tell a story before you know it. You do that by letting the emerging story tell itself through you. As you tell it, you let the story give you your cues about where it is going to go next. At first, you must feel your way, letting it be your guide.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, American writer

Your willingness to explore or confess all that you know about life emotionally. You must render yourself open, maybe painfully so, and deeply interpretive toward your own experience. Writing becomes a personal forensic. Experience, not belief or intellectual conviction, by turns prodigal and indecent and subliminal: that’s what you transfigure and clarify into story. 2.  Your realization of oppositional or pivotal conflict through dramatic dialogue, never exposition, and the nemesis gets the better lines, as in real life. 3.   Your discovery of a resolution that won’t be the same as the one you envisioned when you began.

Writer’s block comes from one’s wanting only to write good stuff. Well, the good stuff and the bad stuff are all part of the stuff. No good stuff without bad stuff.

And how do you make your way from beginning to end? You can be guided at every step by only one intuition: your own sense of rightness. But the sense of rightness can come only after you have been guided away from ten thousand wrong turns by your sense for what is wrong. The sense of rightness and the sense of what is wrong have no independent existence: Each is the other's reverse side. Most good stories die before they are born simply because their authors fail to understand this. That little voice inside says to them, “This is wrong, all wrong,” and they panic, they think they have failed, and they quit. They think that inner voice—wrong; this is wrong—is a reason for stopping. In fact, it is your art's best friend, the other voice of rightness. You must listen to them both, trusting that your intellect is capable of responding to their cues and discerning at least many of their mute meanings. They will be in play every hour you spend at your desk, and they alone can guide you on your path from perplexity, complexity, and conflict to the inevitable. That movement from the improbable to the inevitable is the truest course of a story, and it defines your path.

Several years ago, I asked the then up-and-coming literary agent Noah Lukeman (he has now very much come up) to speak to my advanced group of students at the New York Writers Workshop. At that meeting, Noah was asked his opinion of the Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing. He gave us, he said, the same answer he gives every one who asks that question: “Take the $35,000–$50,000 you're going to spend on the degree, buy yourself a good laptop and printer and a bundle of paper, and go off to a cabin and write. At the end of two years, the worst that can happen is you have nothing. Less than nothing is what you'll almost certainly have at the end of your MFA program, because, besides nothing, you'll also have a mountain of debt.” That may seem like a harsh assessment of the value of MFA programs; it is certainly not uncommon, especially among MFA graduates.

The Pretense That MFA Candidates Are Already Full-Blown Artists. MFA candidates are not full-blown artists in control of their craft. Many of them are unaware of their craft, on any level. Many of them are merely talented or have had the good or bad luck to write one piece interesting enough to impress a member of the admissions committee. Why is this pretense a flaw? Because it enables lazy teaching by promoting the idea that manuscripts submitted are fully considered representations of the best a particular writer has to offer, instead of what they most often are: desperate first drafts whipped off the night or morning before their workshop due date. Amazingly (and sadly), despite the fact that this is the nature of many workshop submissions, many participants still invest a lot of emotion in how well their stories are received by the workshop. And if the manuscripts are treated as if they're anything more than exercises in the training process, the responses can be damaging.

Teachers Who Purport to Believe That Writing Can't Be Taught. When you hear a teacher say that writing can't be taught, run to another workshop. Again, the craft of writing — just like the crafts of music, dance, painting, film, theater, etc. — can be taught. Have you ever heard someone say, “Why on earth are you taking piano instruction? Music can't be taught”? Of course not, but you hear this nonsense all the time about writing. What is especially pernicious about this pervasive idiocy is that many of the teachers hired (often by the most high-profile institutions) purport to believe this. Why do I say purport to believe? Because the idea is something that only stupid people would actually believe, and none of these writers is stupid. But if you believe that writing can be taught, then you have to figure out a way to teach it, and that requires work — and a lot of it — even before the workshops begin.

Grammar includes all the principles that guide the structure of sentences and paragraphs: syntax-the flow of language; usage-how we use words in different situations; and rules-predetermined boundaries and patterns that govern language in a particular society. Mechanics, on the other hand, are ways we punctuate whatever we are trying to say in our writing: punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing, formatting.

The shock of recognition is a moment of excitement that shakes the soul. It may be hard to describe, but like other forms of love, you will know it when you feel it

      •   Include links to community events, newly published books by colleagues, and writing workshops you plan to attend.

#writetip / #writingtip — If you don’t have time to take a workshop, trying using these tags to learn more about your craft. #writing / #editing – These terms are also used, but aren’t nearly as popular as #amwriting and #amediting. #writingblitz – This one is used to let your followers know that today you are writing as fast as you can and locking your internal editor into a closet. #writingfiction – Fiction writers use this hashtag to meet each other or to share their books, goals, or ideas on writing fiction. #writingprompt — Is it hard to get started on the next chapter of your novel? Well, worry no more. Log on to Twitter, search for this tag, and you’ll find a great prompt to get those creative juices bubbling. #ww / #writerwednesday – Is there a writer you would like to introduce to your followers? Use this hashtag and introduce your colleague to your Twitter tribe.

Another well-known study, led by Nancy Andreasen, used structured interviews and matched control groups to examine thirty writers at the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Eighty percent of the writers met formal criteria for a major mood disorder, compared with thirty percent of controls matched for age, education, and sex.

THE TALKING CURE K. J. Zimring | 3996 words Kim Zimring recently moved from Georgia to Seattle. Her poignant story about an old man's memories of a perilous childhood, however, was written in New Mexico, at Walter Jon Williams's "indisputably fine Rio Hondo workshop." Kim is a graduate of Clarion 2005 and her previous stories have appeared in Asimov's, Analog, and the Writers of the Future anthology. My first memory is of my dead mother. I'm crouched by her face, mouth close enough to kiss, waiting for a breath that never comes. An open jar of mushrooms sits beside her, spoon embedded in its boggy heart. Botulism is the cause of death, I presume, though why I selected that for the image I couldn't say. Some warning about home-canned goods wrapped together in my childish brain with the classic Oedipal love/fear complex: Mother, bringing food and death.

The great writers are great as they have big workshop of imagination.

Howard Gruber, a psychology professor at Rutgers, said, “One thing creative people have in common is energy. You frequently find that creative people go for a lot of walks.” “When I sit around with other poets and we talk about the times we feel like writing, often it’s after having done something physical,” Marvin told me. “One of the secrets of life is oxygen; the more you have, the better able you are to do everything, even write a poem.”29

English teachers, workshops, and myths try to make writers slow down. We are the ONLY ART on the planet that tells young artists to not practice and do less to get better. Head-shaking in its stupidity. And new writers buy into that.

For many of my subjects from that first study—all writers associated with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—mental illness and creativity went hand in hand. This link is not surprising. The archetype of the mad genius dates back to at least classical times, when Aristotle noted, “Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.” This pattern is a recurring theme in Shakespeare’s plays, such as when Theseus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, observes, “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.” John Dryden made a similar point in a heroic couplet: “Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

Benefits of Improv To the Editor: Re “Inmate Improv,” by Anna Clark (Op-Ed, Dec. 31): It was not surprising to me that an improvisational theater workshop would help a prison inmate adjust to life after his release. Pretend play has been shown to improve the executive-function skills in preschool and school-age children. These skills include the ability to control emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exercise self-control and discipline. As poor executive-function skills are associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime, it would behoove all adults involved in child-rearing to encourage role-playing or “improv.” STEVEN ROSENBERG Fairfield, Conn., Dec. 31, 2014 The writer is director of the Elementary Reading Program at the University of Bridgeport School of Education.

Deakin假文凭【咨询办理Q微:202-6614433】如何在澳办（迪肯大学毕业证本科硕士文凭）一模一样毕业证，去哪办澳洲Deakin毕业证成绩单认证书。 JKSHKJSSKJSKJSSJSSSBSVBSSVSB David Hoon Kim is a Korean-born American educated in France, who took his first creative writing workshop at the Sorbonne before attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Stegner Program. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Brins d'éternité, Le Sabord and XYZ La revue de la nouvelle. He has been awarded fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, the MacDowell Colony and the Elizabeth George Foundation, among others. Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost is his first book. He writes in English and in French.

Write in order to achieve their best work »​Manage their ongoing development through regular self-assessment and reflection opportunities »​Pursue creative writing topics of their own choosing »​Experiment with narrative techniques most important to them »​Grow in confidence as writers

He [Jake Bonner] hadn't encountered this degree of writerly approbation for a couple of years, and it was incredible how quickly all of the narcotically warm feelings came rushing back. This was what it was to be admired, and thoughtfully admired at that, by someone who knew exactly how hard it was to write a good and transcendent sentence of prose! He had once thought life would be crowded with encounters just like this, not just with fellow writers and devoted readers (of his ever-growing, ever-deepening -oeuvre-) but with students (perhaps, ultimately, at much better programs) thrilled to have been assigned Jacob Finch Bonner, the rising young novelist, as their supervising writer/instructor. The kind of teacher you could grab a beer with after the workshop ended! Not that Jake had ever grabbed a beer with one of his students.

Fear can be a very valuable tool that helps push your career forward. I have learned one lesson that I share with all of my workshop students and writer friends: If something scares you, you should do it. You’re scared for a reason. Fear is the slithering snake whispering vile things in your ear, making you think this new venture will be a total disaster. Usually, it won’t be. If it is, it’s still worth the risk, because you’ll learn something.

Encouraging youths to be creative is preventing so many unhealable disasters out there in the world. A writer for example will focus on their writing, a poet will do their poems just like a sculptor or musician - always finding ways to be the best in their craft. An idle mind is the devil's workshop but a creative mind is a gold mine!

There’s no such thing as writer as a noun. It’s a verb. I am a writer at the moment since I am writing these sentences. When I get away from the table, I will be a walker.

we won't love you if you're perfect

Dear Lindy, Over ten years ago a ten and a half foot Amethystine python tried to take my not quite two year old son from his bed… this weekend I attended a writer’s workshop with… Kate Llewellyn and after reading the enclosed poem she said I MUST send it to you and so here it is… The Letter I should Have Written to Lindy Chamberlain I believe you, Lindy, I know that even now with all that is tamed the Wild is always near In the black of night I lifted my child from his winter bed only to feel a cold weight, skin to skin along my length. Python jaws around my baby’s leg. Two day’s later on TV, whodunnit: the Dingo or the Bitch But I believed you and I wonder Would they have hissed at me on the steamy courthouse steps: ‘The snake is innocent.

AM: My father had arrived in New York all alone, from the middle of Poland, before his seventh birthday… He arrived in New York, his parents were too busy to pick him up at Castle Garden and sent his next eldest brother Abe, going on 10, to find him, get him through immigration and bring him home to Stanton Street and the tenement where in two rooms the eight of them lived and worked, sewing the great long, many-buttoned cloaks that were the fashion then. They sent him to school for about six months, figuring he had enough. He never learned how to spell, he never learned how to figure. Then he went right back into the shop. By the time he was 12 he was employing two other boys to sew sleeves on coats alongside him in some basement workshop. KM: He went on the road when he was about 16 I think… selling clothes at a wholesale level. AM: He ended up being the support of the entire family because he started the business in 1921 or something. The Miltex Coat Company, which turned out to be one of the largest manufacturers in this country. See we lived in Manhattan then, on 110th Street facing the Park. It was beautiful apartment up on the sixth floor. KM: We had a chauffeur driven car. The family was wealthy. AM: It was the twenties and I remember our mother and father going to a show every weekend. And coming back Sunday morning and she would be playing the sheet music of the musicals. JM: It was an arranged marriage. But a woman of her ability to be married off to a man who couldn’t read or write… I think Gussie taught him how to read and to sign his name. AM: She knew she was being wasted, I think. But she respected him a lot. And that made up for a little. Until he really crashed, economically. And then she got angry with him. First the chauffeur was let go, then the summer bungalow was discarded, the last of her jewellery had to be pawned or sold. And then another step down - the move to Brooklyn. Not just in the case of my father but every boy I knew. I used to pal around with half a dozen guys and all their fathers were simply blown out of the water. I could not avoid awareness of my mother’s anger at this waning of his powers. A certain sneering contempt for him that filtered through her voice. RM: So how did the way you saw your father change when he lost his money? AM: Terrible… pity for him. Because so much of his authority sprang from the fact that he was a very successful businessman. And he always knew what he as doing. And suddenly: nothin’. He didn’t know where he was. It was absolutely not his fault, it was the Great Crash of the ‘29, ‘30, ‘31 period. So from that I always, I think, contracted the idea that we’re very deeply immersed in political and economic life of the country, of the world. And that these forces end up in the bedroom and they end up in the father and son and father and daughter arrangements. In Death of a Salesman what I was interested in there was what his world and what his life had left him with. What that had done to him? Y’know a guy can’t make a living, he loses his dignity. He loses his male force. And so you tend to make up for it by telling him he's OK anyway. Or else you turn your back on him and leave. All of which helps create integrated plays, incidentally. Where you begin to look: well, its a personality here but what part is being played by impersonal forces?

The craft of writing is bound to the experience of literacy and language itself.

The only way to begin is to begin, and begin right now. If you like, begin the minute you finish reading this paragraph. For sure, begin before you finish reading this book. I have no doubt the day is coming when you will be wiser or better informed or more highly skilled than you are now, but you will never be more ready to begin writing than you are right this minute. The time has come.

The rightness of things is generally revealed in retrospect, and you're unlikely to know in advance what is right and wrong in a story that has not yet been written.

Cultivate whatever serves your persistence.

Critics can point out the problems in your manuscript, they can offer the right diagnosis, but they may not be able to suggest a remedy. It takes an excellent teacher, someone who has mastered the art of writing, to tell you how to correct a problem. Agents and publishers don’t have time to be teachers (and may not know the solution). A lot of critics (including those in writer’s workshops) want to help, but may not know what the correct remedy is. But that should not stop a dedicated writer. Listen to the criticism, even if it hurts. Learn from it. Even if your critic can’t offer a solution, you will be able to find one, eventually. It may mean slaving over the manuscript until you’re ready to burn it, or it may mean putting it aside until you can look at it with fresh eyes. Let the sting of criticism drive you toward excellence.

Who 'waits for inspiration' has probably never explored the brain. Its much larger than the entire internet. Writing, however, is partly stalking the big wave, and ride it when it comes. However, the thousands and thousands of blokes sitting at the shoreline trying to create waves by splashing their hands in the surf - it might be what they teach at writer workshops, but the sight is absolutely ghastly.

Like a snowflake that never melts—like a tornado that doesn’t swirl—like a lightning bolt fashioned in the workshop of an angel—the soul is more. The true “I” is built as a demi-god.

When you choose a narrator emotionally involved in a drama, you might choose Brontë’s method; when you want distance, choose Grass’s cooler, more matter-of-fact method.

The most familiar of all advice on writing is the old classroom cliché “Write what you know.” It is very much a cliché, and it is going to get rather rough treatment over the course of this book. Yet, like most clichés, it has the residual virtue of being a halftruth.

The essence of drama is that man cannot walk away from the consequences of his deeds.

Through the nonprofit Zinn Education Project (ZEP)—a collaborative effort with Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change—Zinn’s book and dozens of spin-off books, documentaries, role-playing activities, and lessons about Reconstruction, the 1921 Tulsa race riot, taking down “racist” statues, the “FBI’s War on the Black Freedom Movement,” the “Civil Rights Movement” (synonymous with the Black Panthers), the Black Panther Ten Point Program, “environmental racism,” and other events that provide evidence of a corrupt U.S. regime are distributed in schools across the country. According to a September 2018 ZEP website post, “Close to 84,000 teachers have signed up to access” ZEP’s history lessons and “at least 25 more sign up every day.” Alison Kysia, a writer for ZEP who specializes in “A People’s History of Muslims in the United States” and who taught at Northern Virginia Community College, used Zinn’s book in her classes and defended it for its “consciousness-raising power.”64 ZEP sends organizers to give workshops to librarians and teachers on such topics as the labor movement, the environment and climate change, “Islamophobia,” and “General Approaches to Teaching People’s History” (with full or partial costs borne by the schools!). In 2017, workshops were given in six states, Washington, D.C., and Vancouver, Canada.

»​Engage in daily freewriting sessions »​Read their raw, unedited work aloud »​Draw from a living archive of multicultural texts as ready reference »​Honor their artistic mentors by researching a “family tree” of writers, musicians, filmmakers, etc., from whom their writing extends11 »​Publish their work online and/or in a chapbook »​Perform their work at a public venue