Write stuff

At the bookstore yesterday I picked up The Best American Essays 2006, which seems to have a lot of essays on illness, death, and lost or dying pets. For me, the bright spots were the nuggets of wisdom about writing, including the following:

From Lauren Slater's Introduction: "But as an essayist, my interest was not in establishing the facts of a life but in mining the meaning, for me, of the questions that life had spawned. An essayist celebrates questions, loves the liminal, and feels that life is best lived between the may and the be of maybe."

From Poe Ballantine's "501 Minutes to Christ": "I don't recommend the writing life--at least not the one in which you move around a lot, live alone, and work odd jobs. Swing a gig where you hit the big time quick. Be a prodigy, if your agent can arrange it, and then get yourself banned in Boston. I arrived at the discipline late, at the age of twenty-nine, in part because I needed material, but mostly because I boarded a train called the Romantic Debauchery in the mistaken assumption that it would somehow get me to my destination quicker than the ones marked Hard Work and Paying Attention. Hundreds of wrong trains and many lost years later, I have learned that, despite the jovial public legends, inebriation and lucid expression are at odds with each other. If I am to write with spiritual integrity, I cannnot be a drunken butterfly."

From Alan Shapiro's "Why Write?": "It's hard to find the proper balance between the arrogance we need to keep on writing--the arrogance that assumes we have something worth saying, and we're smart enough to learn what someone's smart enough to teach us--and the humility we also need in order to grow and develop, the humility that knows we cannot nurture and refine our gifts without the help of others, that other people, including editors, can sometimes tell us things we need to hear. Too much arrogance and not enough humility and we close ourselves off from the world; nothing new comes in, and we eventually become imitators of ourselves, turning what at one time were discoveries into mannerisms. Too much humility and not enough arrogance and we lose our center of gravity, finding ourselves at the mercy of everyone else's opinion."

And later in the same essay: "People have a right not to be written about. Yet I violate that right in nearly everything I've written. I've done it in the writing of this essay. My theory's always been that if I only try to tell the truth, if I have no ax to grind and write about others in a spirit of forgiveness, curiosity, and understanding, then no one should be upset by anything I say. Well, so much for theory."