Dean Wesley Smith, "Kill the Writer in the Garret Myth--Part 1," presentation at Surrey International Writers' Conference, 2002.

Ray Bradbury, "The Joy of Writing," in Zen in the Art of Writing, Santa Barbara, CA:  Capra Press, 1990, p. 4.

The operative word here is pretend. You couldn't possibly be your characters since you exist in different worlds. There are no wizards or vampires in your neighborhood and you'll probably never get into orbit, more's the pity. The life histories you create for these imaginary people will necessarily be different from your own. You'll have to pretend to be both male and female, young and old, good and evil. Yet no matter how far a story leads away from your own experience, or even from the familiar precincts of reality, you must strive to put yourself in your character's place.

The aim must always be clarity. It's tempting to feel that if a passage of writing is obscure, it must be very deep. But if the water is murky, the bottom might be only an inch below the surface - you just can't tell. It's much better to write in such a way that the readers can see all the way down; but that's not the end of it, because you then have to provide interesting things down there for them to look at. Telling a story involves thinking of some interesting events, putting them in the best order to bring out the connections between them, and telling about them as clearly as we can; and if we get the last part right, we won't be able to disguise any failure with the first - which is actually the most difficult, and the most important.

   Probably the biggest misconception that new writers burden themselves with is the notion that ideas are rare and difficult to come by.... Yet, as any experienced writer knows, ideas are the easiest part of the job.  The air is filled with ideas.  Most professional writers have more ideas than time or energy to write about them.

   So where do all these story ideas come from?

   Look around you.  All the people you know are living with conflict, hope ambition, love, jealousy, fear--the material for a thousand stories is at your fingertips.  Look within yourself.  You have hopes and hatreds, goal and passions.  Every human life is a walking library of stories.

   And what, you ask, does writing teach us?

   First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.  We must earn life once it has been awarded us....

   Secondly, writing is survival.  Any art, any good work, of course, is that.

   Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

   We must take arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout.....Remember the pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know....  A variation of this is true for writers.

   What would happen [if you did not write every day] is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you...the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.

   You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

   For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed.

Writing used to be subversive, something we did to shake up the status quo.  Now with gala black-tie dinners where the hors d'oeuvre are worth more than most writers' houses, it has become the status quo.  We writers need to take back not just the night, but the world.

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

in my lifetime

leads back to this:  the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.