You will feel discouraged; you will lose confidence in your abilities; you will be bored with the charactersโand the only way to overcome these obstacles is to write your way through them. And writing always works.
John DufresneI write with a fountain pen. And then revise word by word and line by line so that the first draft of a scene is usually the tenth or so draft.
John DufresneRevision is not the end of the creative process, but a new beginning. It's a chance not just to clean up and edit, but to open up and discover. The energetic prose comes about from all the energy that went into crafting it, I suppose.
John DufresneWe read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we canโt live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When weโre distressed and go to therapy, our therapistโs job is to help us tell our story. Life doesnโt come with plots; itโs messy and chaotic; life is one damn, inexplicable thing after another. And we canโt have that. We insist on meaning. And so we tell stories so that our lives make sense.
John Dufresne