I think that writing is a muscle
I think that writing is a muscle, and I believe in momentum. I believe that best way to write is by not stopping to examine or judge, but just kind of going on knowing the next word until the thing disconnects itself. The first girl I ever loved sent me a letter once from North Carolina that said you had to start writing from the middle - from the part you really knew and could see - and work your way out. I believe that. I think it’s important also to have a willingness to be profoundly changed and impacted by what you read, a willingness to be awed and leveled and blown away.
But I think when some people begin to speak/write with an audience in mind they lose it. That invisible eye that Kundera talks about pokes a radioactive finger through the mood and everything they do after becomes watched and disingenuous. I also think the confessional culture of the internet creates a system that validates writing through the approval of others. I don’t think you can live that way as a writer. I think it’ll starve you slowly.
For writing to renew itself, I think you just have to personally know that it’s good and necessary and comes from some internal wellspring, some muscle that wants to be worked and fulfilled through it’s own action, that delights in it’s own use as the fullfilmment of it’s preordained function. So when you sit down to write in the morning you’re feeling your way back to a certain flow, a sort of pace, you’re doing it to tap into that fleeting pulse of being that’s always seemed to be there underneath things for you, and not to memorialize or tack importance to events which are probably ultimately too personal to ever hope to explain.
