Listen: Love your fiction, even if you hate the act of creating that fiction, love the stories to a fault. Cry at your tragedies, laugh at your jokes, rejoice at your character's victories — or give it all up and go knit a damned sweater, instead.

Originality is the most deadly mirage in all of art. You can chase it from now until doomsday, and you'll only find yourself lost and dying of thirst.

Writing makes it even harder than concrete. Writing makes it hard as diamond.

Making a story from the messy thoughts and half-thoughts in her head, building a world and lives and taking them apart again, fitting the pieces together another way until it feels right, as right as she can make it feel.

I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.

The long nub end of afternoon spent at her keyboard, her hands moving so much slower than her racing mind, The frustrating lag between her thoughts and the hunt and peck; a hot flood of ideas where there had been months of trickling, uncertain sentences, and Sadie trying to keep up with herself, wishing she'd taken typing in high school, scared that this inspiration would grow restless, impatient with her, and slink back to whatever hole it crawled out of.