Besides doing research for the novel I’m working on (7,000 words in seven days plus the entire plot …plotted) I’m also reading about being a better writer. One of the books I’m reading-one essay a day-is The Writing Life which is a compendium of essays by prominent writers oh heretos and howfors of writing. The first fall under the title of Becoming a Writer
Francine du Plessix Gray: The Seduction of the Text

• Being an admirable reader is the first step towards being a decent writer
• We cannot choose fiction—it can only choose us
• Read voraciously, keep the reader seduced and never worry about what ‘category’ your texts might fall into.

Joyce Carol Oates: The Importance of Childhood

• Her writing is not effortless…She writes by hand, starting stories countless times, making comments as she goes, often producing as many as 1,000 pages of notes for every 250 printed pages. Belle-fleur (1980), which has been chatarerized as springing from a dream, “took lots of work,” with charts and graphs and heavy engineering…Her novel American Appetites had 3,000 pages of worksheets. You Must Remember This had 3,500 pages of side notes. My Heart Laid Bare , 5,000 pages.
• How more accurate to see any artwork as a portal of a kind through which we step, like Alice through the looking-glass, into worlds not our own and unimaginable by us, conjoining ourselves with persons not known to us.
• Each book, its cover opened, led miraculously inward and downward, tunneling away from the mere surface of things.
  The wish to tell stories predates the stories told.
• Tragedy breaks down the dykes between human beings -William Butler Yeats
• Is biology destiny? Not for the writer or artist, it isn’t.