Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

This Is What A Writer Needs

This Is What A Writer Needs

What a writer needs is the same thing that an only child has grown accustomed to:

A little bit of solitude, and a little bit of space.

This looks like nothing but a lifestyle to me though.

For a writer needs a writing life.

Spending the day reading and writing, taking the dog for a walk, maybe taking a nap, maybe a mid-day shower – nothing much sounds better.

This Danish aristocrat had it pretty good too though.

Virginia Wolf said that all a writer needed was a room and money.

I have no idea how some writers work in newsrooms.

We may be halfway through a novel, an essay, a story, or a memoir or we may be nearing the finish line on a piece that has taken us years. But wherever we are in our work, we have never been exactly here, today. Today, we need to relearn what it is that we do. We have to remind ourselves to be patient, gentle with our foibles, ruthless with our time, withstanding of our frustrations. We remember what it is that we need. The solitude of an empty home, a walk through the woods, a bath, or half an hour with a good book—the echo of well-formed sentences in our ears. Whatever it takes to begin again.

-Dani Shapiro, Still Writing

Do You Need A Writing Outline?

Do You Need A Writing Outline?

So is a writing outline always needed?

I would think that a structured outline would be imperative for writing non-fiction – especially book-length non-fiction.

And then with creative writing, you could be a little more free to wander around without a plan.

Shapiro disagrees.

The reference below to Doctorow’s fog is quoted by Anne Lamott in Bird By Bird.

And what do I know?

Dani Shapiro has written 10 marvelous books.

And I write in the internet for three people.

Except that when it comes to creative writing—by which I mean the kind of work that the artist Anne Truitt describes as “the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity”—outlines are not necessarily helpful. We need Doctorow’s fog. If we know too much about where we’re going, the work will suffer along the way. It will convulse and die before our eyes. We’ll end up dragging along a corpse until finally, exhausted, we just give up.

-Dani Shapiro, Still Writing

Sterling Terrell