ruth’s wn entry: my writing.

My writing is evolving.  I’m beginning to reach the art of just letting it be —  meaning allowing the words to take me and in the process evolve into new ideas.  I used to sit down knowing exactly what I want to say and then saying it in a way that was logical, practical, and efficient.

Today I sit down with a hint of an idea, one that is fuzzy and abstract and I just write.  And write.  And write.  All of this writing and thinking leads me to ideas I never knew I had at the beginning of the blank page.  I’m learning what these writers (in the first chapter of Don Murray’s book Shoptalk:  Learning to Write with Writers) mean when they say:

I write to find out what I’m thinking about.  Edward Albee

It seems to me that writing is a marvelous way of making sense of one’s life, both for the writer and for the reader.  John Cheever

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have  been no reason to write.  I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.  What I want and what I fear.  Joan Didion

I write to master my experience.  Herbert Gold

I write; therefore, I am.  Samuel Johnson

We do not write in order to be understood, we write in order to understand.  C. Day Lewis

An experience isn’t finished until it is written.  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I write in order to know why I write.  Alberto Moravia

I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.  Flannery O’Connor

I write to clear my own mind, to find out what I think and feel.  V.S. Pritchett

I did not want to write it.  But in order to find out what I wanted to know, I had to.  Mary Lee Settle

We do not write what we know; we write what we want to find out.  Wallace Stegner

One writes to find words’ meaning.  Joy Williams

And by the way, this happened just now with this post.  See, I intended to talk about my revision process in a very logical, practical, and efficient way.  But, instead, the words took control and led me here:  To a new idea that is making me more complete.