Why We Write: Continued

As I said last week, I just finished reading Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Writers on How and Why They Do What They Do.

As promised, here are some words of wisdom from the contributing writers:

“Whenever I am writing, or more accurately, whenever I have written, I feel better and more at peace as a human being.”
–Rick Moody

“You have deep control, and where else can you find that? You can’t control other people or your relationships or your children, but in writing you can have sustained periods where you’re absolutely in charge.”
–Meg Wolitzer

“My best time as a writer is any day, or any moment, when the work’s going well and I’m completely absorbed in the task at hand. The hardest time is when it’s not, and I’m not. The latter tend to outnumber the former. But I’m a persistent little cuss. And I soldier on.”
–Sue Grafton

“I’ve tried to figure out what good writing is. I know it when I read it in other people’s work or my own. The closest I’ve come is that there’s a rhythm to the writing, in the sentence and the paragraph. When the rhythm’s off, it’s hard to read the thing. It’s a lot like music in that sense; there’s an internal rhythm that does the work of reading for you. It almost reads itself. That’s one of the things that’s hard to teach people. If you don’t hear music, you’re never going to hear it. That internal rhythm in a sentence or paragraph, that’s the DNA of writing. That’s what good writing is.”
–Sebastian Junger

“I can’t think of a reason not to write. I guess one reason would be that nobody was buying my books. Come to think of it, that wouldn’t stop me. I’d be writing anyway.”
–Walter Mosley

“I write to explain myself to myself. It’s a way of processing my disasters, sorting out the messiness of life to lend symmetry and meaning to it.”
–Armistead Maupin

“I need to tell a story. It’s an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later. Why a particular story? I don’t know when I begin. That I learn much later.”
–Isabel Allende

“When you’re trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.”
–Michael Lewis

“When the sentences and the story are flowing, writing is better than any drug. It doesn’t just make you feel good about yourself. It makes you feel good about everything. It can go the other way, too. When you’re deleting page and page, and you just can’t make the characters work, and you’re running up against deadlines, it’s not nearly as euphoric. But actually sitting there and conceiving story ideas and plotting–it’s the coolest profession in the world. I’m paid to daydream.”
–David Baldacci

“Exercise is a good analogy for writing. If you’re not used to exercising you want to avoid it forever. If you’re used to it, it feels uncomfortable and strange not to. No matter where you are in your writing career, the same is true for writing. Even fifteen minutes a day will keep you in the habit.”
–Jennifer Egan

“When I’m writing I have total control. Nothing’s going on the page unless I put it there. It’s not going to stay there unless I want it to stay there. When you sit down at the machine, you create that world, you live in that world, you control that world, it’s only whatever you want it to be. There’s no time when I’m more content, more at ease, than when it’s just me alone in the room for eight hours.”
–James Frey

“There’s a moment in every book when the story and characters are finally there; they come to life, they’re in control. They do things they’re not supposed to do and become people they weren’t meant to be. When I reach that place, it’s magic. It’s a kind of rapture.”
–Sara Gruen

“Sometimes, it’s magical. The characters seem to breathe and take over. I hear their voices very clearly in my head. That’s why I’ve always called writing ‘successful schizophrenia’: I get paid to hear those voices. But at a certain point in every book, something happens that I never saw coming–at least, not consciously–and it’s exactly the puzzle piece the story is missing, the element that ties the threads of the book together. Characters seem to pick their own paths. They have an agenda that I don’t even know about until the conversation or the plot begins inching its way across the typed page. Even though I know the end of my books before writing a single word, I often find that the middle section–how I get from point A to point Z–is a delightful surprise.”
–Jodi Picoult

“My writing has always been very intuitive. When I start a piece I don’t have a plan; I’m not looking ahead. I’m looking only at what I’m doing, and then I look up and realize, Here I am at the other shore of the lake, so I guess I must have been swimming.”
–Gish Jen

“The people who fail at writing are the people who give up because of external pressures, or because they didn’t get published in a certain amount of time. You’ve got to exert your will over the situation.”
–Walter Mosley

“Writing gives me great feelings of pleasure. There’s a marvelous sense of of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to. It’s like trying to write a song, making tiny tweaks, reading it out loud, shifting things to make it sound a certain way. It’s very physical. I get antsy. I jiggle my feet a lot, get up a lot, tap my fingers on the keyboard, check my e-mail. Sometimes it feels like digging out of a hole, but sometimes it feels like flying. When it’s working and the rhythm’s there, it does feel like magic to me.”
–Susan Orlean

“A novelist’s job is to integrate information with the feelings and the stories of her characters, because a novel is about the alternation of the inner world and the outer world, what happens and what the characters feel about it. There’s no reason to write a novel unless you’re going to talk about the inner lives of your characters. Without that, the material is dry. But without events and information, the novel seems subjective and pointless.”
–Jane Smiley

“I write to dream; to connect with other human beings; to record; to clarify; to visit the dead. I have a kind of primitive need to leave a mark on the world. Also, I have a need for money. I’m almost always anxious when I’m writing. There are those great moments when you forget where you are, when you get your hands on the keys, and you don’t feel anything because you’re somewhere else. But that very rarely happens. Mostly I’m pounding my hands on the corpse’s chest.”
–Mary Karr

“What disturbs me is that the act of writing is associated with work, rather than pleasure. In the beginning it was associated only with pure pleasure. Now it’s a mixture.”
–Michael Lewis

“Writing is about the only way (besides praying) that allows me to be compassionate toward folks who, in real life, I’m probably not that sympathetic toward.”
–Terry McMillan

“My good ideas come from the world. I harvest them but I don’t have to think them up. All I have to do is take these things I’ve seen–things people have said to me, things I’ve researched, artifacts from the world–and convert them into sequences of words that people want to read. It’s this weird alchemy, a kind of magic. If you do it right, it will get read.”
–Sebastian Junger

“My reason [for writing] is mainly neurotic, I suspect: I am never really comfortable speaking, and writing allows me the time and serenity to make better what I cannot do in speech. It’s a peaceful and cloistered space, the page, where I don’t feel pressured the way I do in the world.”
–Rick Moody

“A lot of writers are defeated by the system of writing. I was talking to one recently. He said he couldn’t get published, so he was thinking of quitting. I said, ‘You have to be kidding me, right? You’re not writing for publication. You’re writing to write.’ If you’re looking to get married, you need another person. If you’re looking to write, you really don’t. My favorite writers–Charles Dickens, Mark Twain–come from a time when publishing wasn’t completely in the domain of capitalism. I’m a writer, not a seller. So I have to keep myself from thinking about the bottom line, so it’s the publisher saying, ‘I want you to make a lot of money,’ not me saying it.”
–Walter Mosley

“I see writer’s block as a message from Shadow, informing me that I’m off track. The ‘block’ is the by-product of a faulty choice I’ve made. My job is to back up and see if I can pinpoint the fork in the road where I headed in the wrong direction. Sometimes I’ve misunderstood a character or his or her motivation. Sometimes I’ve laid out events in a sequence that muddies the story line. Usually I don’t have to retrace my steps more than a chapter or two, and the error is easily corrected.”
–Sue Grafton

“Writing is always giving some sort of order to the chaos of life. It organizes life and memory.”
–Isabel Allende

“Writing is not fun for me. The early part is fun–the percolating, as I think of it–but the actual process is glacial and full of self-doubt.”
–Armistead Maupin

“You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly. You can’t write regularly and well. One should accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.”
–Jennifer Egan

“I never actually delete anything I write. If I know a paragraph, page, chapter, or scene has to go, I put it in a file called ‘Leftovers.’ I’ve never recycled a single word from that file, but it’s one of those silly mental crutches that allows me to get rid of stuff. And getting rid of stuff is half the battle.”
–Sara Gruen

“When [the writing] is good…it’s like going on a date that’s going well. There’s an electricity to the process that’s exciting and incomparable to anything else.”
–Sebastian Junger

“I don’t find myself thinking, ‘I can’t write about that because it won’t sell.’ It’s such a pain in the ass to write a book, I can’t imagine writing one if I’m not interested in the subject.”
–Michael Lewis

“I think that a good deal of my life is, perhaps, essentially a quest toward freedom from anxiety. Being engaged in prose, especially when it’s going well, can keep the anxiety of the world away.”
–Meg Wolitzer

“Structure in a novel is something you discover, not something you superimpose. Don’t sit at your keyboard and be a slave to an outline.”
–Rick Moody

“Writing gave me a way to frame my thoughts and feelings without the danger of actual confrontation.”
–Armistead Maupin

“I write to shed dead skin and to explore why people do the things that we do to each other and to ourselves.”
–Terry McMillan

“Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it’s like to cross the world on a ship or fight  war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that’s still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it.”
–Walter Mosley

“These are not contemplative times, and writing is a contemplative experience. The idea that something is thoughtful and slow, and takes its time to reveal itself, is not in keeping with today’s velocity.”
–Meg Wolitzer

***
Based on these thoughts and other excerpts in the book, my conclusion is this:
Writers are neurotic, masochistic, quiet, stubborn people looking to exert some control and express some shit.
Agree?