The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

Writing is a way to uncover and discover a new truth. It comes from, and speaks to, the deepest well-spring of the human being, the place that is the source of our inner knowledge, intuition and instinct.

Writing is all about discovery. It is my own journey into the unknown, no less than my characters' journey. Knowing and creating are almost opposite for me. In order to create, I must leave ample space for the unknown. It turns the writing process into an adventure.

Writing, when all is said and done, is an attempt to understand one's own circumstance and to clarify the confusion of existence, including insecurities that do not torment normal people, only chronic nonconformists, many of whom end up as writers after having failed in other undertakings.

Writing is bewitching, like a song or cadence. I arrive at words the way one arrives at spells. Poetry is a story that attaches itself to my feet, my being. Sometimes I will lie down on the earth, invent poems about lost love and fear. Writing is a form of love, of loving and being loved. These aren't words, syllables, or useless alphabets launched by chance or an obsession with speech. Each word wants its own freedom to transform reality into wonder, to create another story, to uncover longings, happiness, the astonishing world between the pen and the shattered paper, limber and fragile. Writing is a way to truth, to telling the truth and tieing it to books, to stone walls.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand — a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods — or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Writing for me is an act of discovery, I am learning about the characters even as I am writing them. In reality, we rarely know why people do the things they do. I think it is enough, sometimes, to simply point to something and allow the readers to reach their own conclusions.

Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.

What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.

It's the writing that teaches you.

Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?

Writing is really a way of thinking — not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us?

First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know — and what we don’t know — about whatever we’re trying to learn.