Maybe you didn’t need to know anything special to write a work of fiction. Maybe you didn’t need to delve into some kind of life question you knew you’d lived. Perhaps your subconscious would do...

She meant you have to live a story for a time.”And?”And then you can write it, in time. What have you lived?”Kind of a personal question for Twitterland.”Kind of the perfect question to answer in...

No deal. I want a novel. September sounds good.

Had Mary Shelley fretted so? Maybe yes, maybe no. She’d begun her classic work on a dare. Had culled a dream to bring it into being. But it was not lost on Laura that the...

She wrote about herself through the lens of her father.”The really good novelists, Laura thought, put their fathers, and maybe their mothers too, deeper into the stories. Which, she suddenly thought, might redeem Melville just...

Writing starts with living.—Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

Maybe Laura’s real problem came in admitting this: there was nothing new under the sun. To write a story would be, somehow deep down, to embrace her limits, to admit that, indeed, she would someday...

We will need to find people who will provide a safe writing space for us, where criticism comes late and love and delight come early.—from Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

dynamite the world” the writer inhabited. He claimed that writing stories was an exercise in freedom and quarreling—out-and-out rebellion, whether or not the writer was conscious of it. And this rebellion, Vargas Llosa reminded his...

Writing starts with living.

Tea was more than boiling water. There were decisions to be made and a frame of mind to develop, no matter how imperceptible.

This is what Laura loved about literature. You could see things in it that perhaps weren’t there, but might be. And even that didn’t matter if, in the end, readers needed something to be there....

Her tea basket was still lost, but that didn’t seem to matter now. People used to eat loose tea on long journeys. They’d pack it into hard little cakes they’d pull out later, to gnaw...

Have tea, might write,” Laura returned.

If she was going to write a novel, she felt defeated before she began, because someone might be coming along to pick it apart, looking for symbols like The Conch or The Whale, which seemed...