are you a writer... or an author?

"Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."

Collette

Rules for Writing

"These are the rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story" Elmore Leonard.

some favorite quotes from Elmore Leonard:

Style is the sound of the writing. 

Writing is rewriting.

It takes me 4 pages of writing to get 1 page I like.

It gets harder.

and another he quotes:

Words can get in the way of what you're trying to say. Joseph Conrad.

Becoming a writer: choose? or chosen?

"Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days." Paul Auster (b.1947)

Brands narrated by a 5 year old

Blessed Tree

Writing is Boiling Down

"It's like boiling down. Four pages can go through six, eight, ten drafts to get down. The beginning is always rewritten much more than the rest, because it's the setting up of information as well as the telling of the story--that's always much harder to juggle." SUSAN MINOT

Writing--it's as much about what you take out as what you put in. 

Balancing writing and promoting--Billy Collins

When asked what Georgia's incoming poet laureate should keep in mind, Billy Collins said:

"The best thing you can do it writer really, really good poetry. You can be an advocate, but the best you can do to spread the word of poetry is to write really good poetry. the other thing is, [poet] Robert Hass called me up when I became poet laureate and he said, 'They're going to be pulling you, interviewing you to death, dragging you from one place to another. Just don't leave the place where you write your poetry. Don't give up that psychological spot here the poetry comes from because they will try to drag you out of there and make you a public figure.' Being a poet is a very private activity and you have to hold onto your solitude." 

What a great way to balance writing, with speaking about and promoting what you've written. You need to be out there reading from your work, and speaking. Publishers expect it--even require it.

But I love this reminder: your best work is writing, and the most important thing you can do is to hold onto your solitude where your writing came from in the first place.

Billy Collins on writing every day

"I'm a writer every day, but I don't write every day. Every day I'm looking for those ducks to land on the water, or something to nudge me toward the page. But I don't really have any compositional habits. I'm afraid it's still kind of a romantic view of writing. I have to wait for something to startle me rather than just hacking it out every day. But it doesn't take much to startle me. My stepdaughter, who was 16 a couple of years go, was doing all these drawings of princesses and fairy tale castles and fantasy stuff. Fair enough. But one day she came in with a little drawing of a scallion o a plate and I wrote a poem about it because I thought she was moving from one phase to another. She was moving out of fantasy into the simplicity of real things." Billy Collins

How freeing to read that Billy Collins doesn't write every day. If you're not one of those writers who writes every day (and hard as I try I'm really not)--you can feel guilty, like you're failing, not doing it right, not living up to your potential. You name it.

But perhaps that's too limited a view of what it means to be a writer. What if it's not about the typing or your desk or word counts or pages? What if it's actually about showing up. Whatever that means that day. Whether that means you're at your desk or out watching children in a playground--whatever you're doing--the point is you're showing up and being one on whom nothing is lost.

"I'm a writer every day but I don't write every day."

All I can say is, if Billy Collins can write the way he does and not write every day, then that's good enough for me.