We are constantly telling ourselves what we most want to know, and at the same time are deaf to it. Why does envy have such a fierce bite? Why do we fall silent or get worried just as our story is about to spring out of our control and into its own life? Whose shadow falls across the page?

Bonnie Friedman

Categorized in : Fall Spring Envy

Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties.

Bonnie Friedman

successful writing believe

our finest writing will certainly come from what is unregenerate in ourselves. It will come from the part that is obdurate, unbanishable, immune to education, springing up like grass.

Bonnie Friedman

finest grass writing

Writing teaches writing. Your writing will teach you how to write if you work hard enough and have enough faith.

Bonnie Friedman

hard-work enough writing

To gain the book, one must give up all hope for the book. It is the only way the book can get written.

Bonnie Friedman

giving-up book way

The only way [the book can be written] is to set the unbook-the gilt-framed portrait of the book-right there on the altar and sacrifice it, truly sacrifice it. Only then may the book, the real live flawed finite book, slowly, sentence by carnal sentence, appear.

Bonnie Friedman

sacrifice real book

I spent the morning smashing fliesI killed one fly against the doorjamb. Another I stalked into the kitchen...A third fly wavered by the kitchen window. When I swatted, a wild ferocious swing, a whole trembling crowd shot from the window like pebbles from a blunderbuss, then settled back. My heart pounded. I felt flushed with disgust and irritation. Why must I always have such obstacles to my writing?

Bonnie Friedman

heart writing morning

Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing.

Bonnie Friedman

keep-believing successful writing

Fiction structures an experience for the reader to live through. ... That is why people read: to have experiences.

Bonnie Friedman

reading book people

The antidote to envy is one's own work. Always one's own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it. The answers you want can come only from the work itself.

Bonnie Friedman

envy work thinking

Envy is one of the scorpions of the mind, often having little to do with the objective, external world.

Bonnie Friedman

scorpions envy mind

How we learn is what we learn. by Bonnie Friedman

How we learn is what we learn.

Bonnie Friedman

learning

Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of con... by Bonnie Friedman

Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.

Bonnie Friedman

body mind fiction

Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely. by Bonnie Friedman

Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely.

Bonnie Friedman

daily-life life-is writing

What is this thing that has us chewing at our own selves, grating ourselves against our own sharp sieve? It is the act of stepping back. It is the act of separating, and judging. It takes only one because the one becomes two.

Bonnie Friedman

judging self two

An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth. by Bonnie Friedman

An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth.

Bonnie Friedman