Love Matters Most: My Latest Writing Credo
Love is literature’s essential ingredient. If we writers can center ourselves in our love—for the subject matter, for the writing process, for the language, for the readers—then we’ve got it made.
Love is literature’s essential ingredient. If we writers can center ourselves in our love—for the subject matter, for the writing process, for the language, for the readers—then we’ve got it made.
Perhaps we writers love to write because we love loving, and we intuit that writing exercises this capacity.
Forgiving ourselves and proceeding regardless is a fundamental part of living fully, and writing well.
What’s the real value of our writing? Others may answer this differently, but here is my take: Does the act of writing help you come more alive? Then it’s valuable. Does your writing help even one other reader come more alive? Then it’s valuable.
If moral writing is “unmistakably and unsentimentally rooted in love,” bring it on!
We can be in dialogue with our whole being, accepting what life makes of us, taking what has happened, and making of it something new. From this dynamic exchange comes aliveness—our own and the world’s.
The funny thing is that, wrong as we are, we do belong here, and wrong as our work may be, it belongs as well. Everything is cracked, and everything is beautiful.
Revision insists that we reject the single story in favor of layered, complex, and contradictory stories. Just as intimacy and awareness break down our stereotypes, intimacy with and awareness of our material break apart our over-simplifications and half-truths.
Because of Robinson’s vast permission to explore what she wills however she wills, she’s creating literature that ministers to a profound and very contemporary thirst—for grace, for beauty, for kindness. She teaches me that those hidden, peculiar, contrary motivations that rise up when I’m given solitude are even more worthy than I thought.
All writers know the magic of putting aside a problematic passage (for a nap or a walk) only to have the solution appear unbidden. This turning away from writing is, paradoxically, an essential part of writing.