“You would learn very little in this world if you were not allowed to imitate….But in the world of writing it is originality that is sought out, and praised, while imitation is the sin of sins. Too bad. I think if imitation were encouraged much would be learned well that is now learned partially and haphazardly….A [writer] develops his or her own style slowly, over a long period of working and thinking – thinking about other styles, among other things. Imitation fades as a [writer’s] own style – that is, the [writer’s] own determined goals set out in the technical apparatus that will best achieve those goals – begins to be embraced.” Mary Oliver
“One thing I realized rather quickly was that the organizing principle didn’t matter much. Whether I used a metaphor, an experience, or a form—they were a conduit to that deep unconscious mind where all art is made. I like to use the analogy of a car. Diction, syntax, imagery, line, subject—all the elements of poetic craft—are like the chassis, steering wheel, windshield, tires, seats of a car. When you see them together, you say “car.” But without the engine, that car is going nowhere. The deep self is the engine of a poem.” Barbara Hamby
“Don’t write what you know. Write what you are willing to discover.” Yusef Komunyakaa
“E.E. Cummings said a poet a “someone who is abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement”.
Which is to say the highest form of concentration possible: fascination; to report on the electrifying experience of being.” Sabrina Ward Harrison
…I find it obvious that the “I” of my poems, when I employ first-person, could never be me. The speaker of my poems couldn’t live in my world: she wouldn’t wake for work, she’d tell the neighbors to shut up, she’d be arrested for public indecency, she’d no doubt be locked up eventually. My life would be far too boring for her to stand for more than fifteen minutes. That’s not to say that her concerns aren’t my own, or that readers don’t see the inflection of my genes, the language of my dreams, imprinted in her every statement and action. But I can’t write poems without being assured that they will not be understood as autobiography.” Cate Marvin
“Language. Words. The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language, and this was as true then as it is now.” John Banville
“Fiction is just a constant torment, and an embarrassment. I loathe my fiction. I have a fantasy when I’m passing a bookstore that I could click my fingers and all my books would go blank, so that I could start again and get it right.” John Banville
“Write about it by day, and dream about it by night”. – E. B. White
“The thing about writers that people don’t realize is that a lot of what they do is play” Margaret Atwood
“In children…the impulse to tell stories and the impulse to play with words often seems to coincide, seem, indeed, to be part of the same impulse. The differences between poetry and fiction, between poets and fiction writers, may now be too well understood, may be understood with artificial certainty. It may be more useful at the moment to think about their similarities.” Brian Phillips
Like almost everyone, I have been a fascinated bystander at more than a few of those arrival scenes. But the specific details of the arrival scene in my book are manufactured, and it is always imagination I rely upon rather than my own memory—which is, I’ve found, disconcertingly focused, in a not very helpful way. Anne Tyler
Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similes (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time). Hemingway, Ernest
I write every day for a set number of hours. And I STILL only manage to generate what I generate. If I didn’t have that discipline, that drive, I wouldn’t get nothing fucking done. I’m just one of those cats who writes a hundred pages to find five that are worth anything. A low rate of exchange but as a third world kid I’m used to such injustices. Junot Diaz
Oh my God—my graveyard of dead stories extends for miles. I’m the great destroyer of my own talent. Ruthless, implacable, cruel. I rarely come back to anything, which says a lot about how fucked up I am…. So many months of silence, of failing, something eventually reaches out of the middens, a bit of light, a whisper, a face. I don’t draw from my life around me much. There seems to be a ten year moratorium on my life before I can write about it. It really is a confounding thing. I have talent, I know I do, it just never comes easy. Junot Diaz
It irks me when my work is discussed for ideas and themes, which are alien to me. Stories are visions. I write down pictures in my mind. That’s the heart of it. Of course, I’m not mindless, not an idiot, and my visions are shaped by shadowy thoughts that some people like to call ideas or themes. But nothing interests me except the vision itself. Steven Milhauser
Who knows where stories come from? Not me. I do know that I often think back to grade school or high school and dimly recall people who were in my classes but whom I didn’t know, didn’t think much about. They have a kind of half-existence, a ghost-existence, in my mind. Everyone carries around these ghosts. At some point I became haunted by the idea of such a person, who, always ignored, would gradually fade away. The vision of a fading person became connected to my old interest in the locked-room mystery. Somehow a story emerged. The images you mention are in the world, and I used them for my own ends. Steven Milhauser
Writers like to pretend that the words flow onto the page in a hot red stream from a vein they’ve open in their wrists. But we all know it’s not like that. We blunder across a blank page like a fireman lost in smoke, hoping to find the fire. And we should thank god there are people in the academy who are willing to teach us. When I was a firefighter, we spent hours in the training center, practicing. And I spent years in medical school and residency, learning how to move people through the ER safely and quickly. I am grateful for the training officers, attending physicians, and academic writers who have taught me how to do these things I’ve loved. (Paul Austin)
“Reading is like food to a writer; without it, the writer part of you will die-or become spindly and stunted. If you’re afraid that reading will make you less original, don’t be. Falling under the spell of-or reacting against-other writers is part of what will lead you to your own work.” Kim Addonizio
“If there aren’t piles of broken shards around your studio, you aren’t a real potter.” Dennis Foley
“Though my first reading of a poem is likely to take pleasure in the language, the tonalities, the music and linguistic sparkle, the intelligence and taste behind the phrasing, nonetheless, I find myself unlikely to finish reading a poem if it becomes apparent that the poet has no intention of communicating much of anything beyond all that language, all that music. Far be it from me to invade his privacy.” Steve Kowit
“I find that audiences listen more intently when they are following a story. Any good lyric poem ought by its nature imply a story, a movement of the mind and heart from one view to another.” JD McClatchy
“It is the job of the poet to reveal her vulnerability. If she doesn’t, there is no sensitivity in the writing. And, it is this vulnerability that is most powerful in us.” Phil Shultz
“I always write about my own experiences, whether I’ve had them or not.” Ron Carlson
“Picasso said, ‘Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.’ I like to think of it this way: The page is a kind of stage. When you step onstage, you become a character. When you write a first-person poem, you also become a character, even if you are describing actual events from your life…Sharon Olds speaks of first-person poems about intimate events as the ‘apparently personal.’ Asked about a poem in which the speaker forgave her father, a difficult, abusive man who appears in much of her work, she responded, ‘Oh, I didn’t forgive him. I only write that I did.’” Kim Addonizio
“I think one of the main things is simply concrete detail. After all, speaking is one of the newer arts of human beings. Seeing is infinitely older…Draw me a picture, make a movie, and let me see. I think that’s the large thing with poetry. It’s not all of it. But it’s one of the big parts. The concreteness. If a poem is abstract it’s not human and therefore can’t have an emotional impact on the human who is reading it. And if it’s not going to have an emotional impact, that’s ok, but I’m not interested.” Jack Gilbert
