Whenever we face challenges, we have the privilege of framing them in words—words that express our hopes, our losses, our dreams; words that transform our personal vision or the world's. These words can become a source of sustenance and discovery, for the sometimes long work of bringing to birth necessary change.

Writing starts with living.—Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

We will need to find people who will provide a safe writing space for us, where criticism comes late and love and delight come early.—from Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

If she was going to write a novel, she felt defeated before she began, because someone might be coming along to pick it apart, looking for symbols like The Conch or The Whale, which seemed to have mythic proportions.

She meant you have to live a story for a time.''And?''And then you can write it, in time. What have you lived?''Kind of a personal question for Twitterland.''Kind of the perfect question to answer in fiction.

Maybe you didn’t need to know anything special to write a work of fiction. Maybe you didn’t need to delve into some kind of life question you knew you’d lived. Perhaps your subconscious would do the job for you, if only you dared to dream.

Laura thought Bell would have a few things to say to Pynchon. And Laura had a few things to say to Bell, like, How the hell was a writer supposed to know when she was one-fifth through her novel-writing, so she could cut a door into the wall and shove her character out into the forest?

Have tea, might write,” Laura returned.

Maybe Laura’s real problem came in admitting this: there was nothing new under the sun. To write a story would be, somehow deep down, to embrace her limits, to admit that, indeed, she would someday die—if not of a worm or a ceiling, then of something else. The very nature of a story admitted this reality. To be a writer was to say, yes, I am just another Murasaki, and it is quite possible that no one will remember my name.