“I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.”
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Joyce Carol Oates 89
American author 1938Related quotes
(5 August 2007)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2007
Context: I cannot force it. I have never been able to force it. Like I've said before, writing is a wild magic (at least it is for me). It comes when it's ready, and then, if I'm lucky, I have some small say in where it goes and what it does. This is one reason I can't comprehend why some writers talk so much about "craft." Crafts are something you learn how to do. I never learned to write. I write better now than I did ten years ago, and far better than I did twenty years ago, but I'm not exactly sure why. To me, it is an almost ineffable thing. I try to explain what it is I do, and how it is I do it … on those extremely rare occasions when I try to explain … and, for me, it's like grasping at air. I have no craft talk, no theory, no dos and don'ts, no discernible process. I sit here in my chair at my desk in front of the iMac, and when I'm lucky, it happens. It's not so much that I think the "writing as craft" people are wrong. They can't be wrong, not if they are crafting stories and know they are crafting stories. But I don't craft stories. So, for me, we have here these two different paradigms. I spark. They craft. Two incommensurable world views. I cannot explain to them what it is that I do. I cannot even explain it to myself. And I cannot comprehend what they do.
Remarks after losing to the Pittsburgh Steelers http://scores.espn.go.com/nfl/recap?gameId=221013004 13 October 2002.
As quoted in "Voicing With a Heart" by Ernie Rideout, in Keyboard (August 2000)
“While I'm writing, I'm far away;
and when I come back, I've gone.”
"Pay Attention" in Handbook for the Soul (1995) edited by Benjamin Shield
Debby Ryan's Winter Fashion And Beauty Tips https://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/a19701/debby-ryan-fashion-interview/ (November 8, 2012)
"One Day in the Afternoon of the World" (1964)
Context: I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.