We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Joan DidionWriting nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
Joan DidionI can't imagine writing if I didn't have a reader. Any more than an actor can imagine acting without an audience.
Joan Didion