Writing tips

For me, there seem to be several different routes into writing. One involves simply paying attention to something that bothers me, tugs at me repeatedly: an image or a conflict, a phrase or a word. I explore it through turning it into a piece of fiction or a poem.

I ask myself a question whose answer I didn’t know, so that writing the resulting novel or story became a voyage into the unknown. Desire is the energy for keeping going: desire to find out, desire to make something in language, desire to reach a temporary conclusion.

Desire is the key word that translates another kind of inspiration. Falling in love gives me a story whose beginning I may imagine, whose end I don’t know. I write the story to find out its end, to allow myself my heart’s desire.