Mar 10, 2021
Does Your Revision Process Need More Taylor Swift?
For all her various contrived public personas and her possibly manufactured cult following, Taylor Swift is a modern day poet.
For all her various contrived public personas and her possibly manufactured cult following, Taylor Swift is a modern day poet.
“Where the fiction began—and who was authoring it—was getting confusing.”
“I am posting a bulletin from the sanctuary behind that closed bedroom door.”
My first screenwriting gig, a skateboarding chimpanzee, and a hospital cancer ward.
In the quiet forced upon me, I started to hear the voices of other selves.
How I wrote a failed sonnet that turned into my fourth novel.
“I now see fiction—my own and that of others—as work paused but never finished.”
“I now accept that I am forever doomed to learning from my mistakes, whether in crafting a sentence, creating a book, or living out my life. That’s the writer’s burden.”
“My new professor, with his reading list of Central and Eastern European literature, had handed me a vast map with so much good territory to explore.”
“If I could write a eulogy for him, convey his value in a single page of prose, then how could I justify wasting 80,000 words on invented characters whom I felt nothing for?”
“It feels reassuring to write everything you remember, how it all felt. But to write well sometimes involves rejecting reassurance.”
