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Writers' Resources |
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We posed the following questions to writers: What is the best writing advice you ever got? What writing book particularly helped you? Some of the answers we received appear below:
Assume you have forever to finish, but start today and don't look up till it's truly done.
--Reynolds Price
From Toni AmatoThe Peter Elbow books, Writing Without Teachers and Writing With Power, helped me overcome writer's block and see the kernel inspiration, writing, and revising as phases of an organic process.
From Anne HudsonThe late William Dickey, my friend and graduate school teacher, told me something I often repeat: "This is wonderful, but it impedes the progress of the poem--it must go." Often, of course, that is the line or phrase I am most attached to. As a younger woman, I found myself writing poems, and they were published. . . After several years a friend suggested I join a writers' group . . . The leader of the group took out a pencil and, after reading each poem, slashed out at least half. I was horrified, then curious. Looking at my mutilated work, I realized each piece was incomparably better. The real poem, hiding in all those extra words, had emerged.
From Rebecca RadnerThe poet William Dickey once said to me, "You can't tell all you know." Very, very freeing.
From Susan RawlinsThere are many books that have helped me, including Natalie Goldman's Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind. But I thought back to early memories, and this surfaced: My father was a writer and one of the things he told me was that if I wanted to be a writer, I should be writing all the time, noting thoughts and impressions on envelopes, scraps of paper, napkins.His influence was both helpful and stifling, because he was quite judgmental, and when he died, I decided the only way I could write without being overly self-critical was to use cheap spiral notebooks that would give me the freedom to write whatever I wished without having to be brilliant, and then, if I felt like it, I could throw the notebooks away.
From Donna Spector
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Flowers, Pebble Beach, California
Photograph by Anne Hudson