What can great writers of the past teach us about living a creative life? What role does reading (and writing) play in becoming wiser? This piece captures what some of the greatest writers of all time had to say on writing, reading, and life.
The Purpose of Writing (and Reading)
What is the purpose of writing? Why does anyone take up this creative pursuit? “Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write,” advised the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, “see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart….” The American novelist George R.R. Martin believes there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. According to Martin,
“The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms will be in the house, what kind of roof they’ll have, where the wires will run, and what kind of plumbing there will be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed, and water it. As the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.”
How might a regular writing practice change your life? In the short and excellent book Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott explains how writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our understanding of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored.
19 Short Rules for (the Creative) Life
(1) “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” — Thomas Mann
(2) “I always kept two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
(3) “You can make anything by writing.” — C.S. Lewis
(4) “A word after a word after a word is power.” — Margaret Atwood
(5) “Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer.” — Alan Watts
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