In the part-confessional, part-instructive, and entirely user-friendly On Writing, Stephen King likens authors to paleontologists: stories, he says, “are found things, like fossils in the ground,” and it’s the writer’s job to unearth them. Ernest Hemingway, in his minimalist way, stated that “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.” And Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael, once said, “Most beginning writers (and I was the same) are like chefs trying to cook great dishes that they’ve never tasted themselves.”**
Every writer has their own take on writing; when the ideas come hard or don’t come at all (or are simply hard to dig up, design, or prepare, as the case may be), we find ourselves thinking about the act of writing. And since it’s in our nature, we do tend to write about writing, turning the machine on itself, interested in (and maybe a little afraid of) this strange act of creative auto-cannibalism. The end result, more often than not, is that we discover more about ourselves as writers than we do about writing. We realize we see writing through the lens of other life experiences; we do, after all, use what we know to explain what we don’t. Continue reading
