Write Way Essay

05/30/2025

Sarah Manguso quote from a typewriter interview by Austin Kleon.

01/17/2025

https://austinkleon.substack.com/p/100-quotes-that-helped-me-write

"“The fact is one's own voice is not heard anywhere else. It's a challenge to be yourself. It takes a lot of courage.”
—Yusef Lateef

From last year’s commonplace diary

01/17/2025

"The thesaurus is often scorned as a trinket case filled with useless fancy words. Why be stuck with ordinary workaday "speed" when you can impress with the gossamer sheen of "celerity"? I once knew a writer who claimed that using one was a stain upon the craft, since the words should come burbling out of your inner source and nowhere else. Which is all fine and mystical, except that sometimes you do need a substitute for that one word that keeps insistently recurring in your text, and sometimes you seek a shade of meaning that just refuses to appear on your mental palette, and sometimes you have to retrieve that term, on the tip of your tongue, that keeps eluding you, maybe for deeply embarrassing psychological reasons. The dictionary is a great place to see language laid out in neat alphabetical rows, like an army at a ceremonial drill. You sense its massive breadth and might, note the rare words flitting by in their exquisite plumage, admire the deep versatility of a plebeian word like "set." The thesaurus, on the other hand, is an immense illustrated bird guide, with row upon row, page after page of related specimens that initially look identical, until you notice this tuft of gray feathers, that extra band around the eye. No two are exactly alike, just as no two words ever mean exactly the same thing. W. H. Auden said that a poet should "hang around words and overhear them talking to one another." Roget's Thesaurus is a convenient place to find them, gathered in their affinity groups."

Lucy Sante

Part four of How to Sit Down

03/04/2024

Austin Kleon's Friday newsletter list includes Alasdair Gray’s latest movie in the weekly blog. Kleon also mentions Gray's response to the question Can Reading be Taught:

"Of course! I couldn’t write before I was was taught! That’s why they give it to you in primary schools. Writing and speaking are things that have to be learned first. Some people at a certain stage think that they don’t have to learn any more. If you’re very interested in words then you try to keep on learning more. And the best way, of course, is by reading other writers. Good ones! Or even bad ones are better than none to begin with."
--Alasdair Gray

02/19/2024

Email us at [email protected] to schedule an appointment.

02/19/2024

“We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we ‘modify’ before we print.”
—Samuel Clemens, Life on the Mississippi

02/19/2024

What deadlines are you working on this month?

11/19/2023

“Of audiobooks and their unique storytelling abilities, Mark Haddon, the author of the best-selling book “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime,” perhaps said it best: “I haven’t read a book properly until I’ve had it read to me.”

—New York Times, November 2023

Interesting.

Maybe this would be a good technique for finishing a college admissions or scholarship essay—ask someone read your final draft to you before you hit submit.

11/13/2023

My Friday highlight is reading a weekly email I receive from Austin Kleon. He shared this incredible quote about writing last week:

Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life: “One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.”

If you are not already following Austin Kleon, I suggest you do.

Website of the New York Times bestselling author of STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST and other books.

11/06/2023

"What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?

Meditation has become a part of my writing process. And when I am meditating, I am giving thanks and also very much asking for guidance, for input, for the ability to hear and feel the presence of ancestors and my own higher self. I’ll sit and close my eyes and get into the rhythm of unhurried breathing. I’ll watch the swirling image patterns behind my closed eyes, and accept as purposeful the feelings and ideas that often emerge from this process. Writing can be so lonely. The whims and needs of ego can be so destabilizing. Listening out beyond my own known self gives me the feeling that I am porous, and that I can think in dialogue with another larger intelligence."

Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith’s To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul is available tomorrow, so we asked her a few questions about her readers, when she writes, and her favorite book to recomme…

10/17/2023

National Day on Writing®

08/23/2023

Past winners of our student contests share their best writing moves.