Writing Archives - Page 3 of 3 -

June

2012

Why I Haven’t Posted in Over Three Months; Writers and Time; and Some Useful Advice

I haven’t posted lately. My law practice is busy, and when I have free time I usually choose fiction writing over blog writing. All writers have this devil’s choice – use your good hours to create, or use them to promote what you create. Many writers, particularly those who have a time-intensive day job, have […]

March

2012

Writing

Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it is the MFA programs

First, Tim Parks’s translation of Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is unspeakably brilliant and remains for me, nearly twenty years after its publication, as close to a religious experience as I’ve ever had. Second, Mr. Parks’s latest piece in The New York Review of Books, “The Writer’s Job,” is dead-on right, except […]

But if the writing doesn't matter to the writer solely for its own sake, without hope of external validation, then it doesn't matter.

If you can’t write for yourself, if you can’t write for those shadows creeping along a silent wall and measuring out your time on this earth in increments of everything else you could be doing, if you can’t write while knowing you are destroying your time on a beautiful madness that nobody will ever validate and many will mock – then please don’t call yourself a writer. Real writing isn’t for sissies. It’s more than putting words on the page. It’s denying everything else to be able to put those words on the page while knowing that the mess of language you’ve created is all you’ll ever get out of it.

-Karen Michalson, “Why We Read Strangers”