Use your notebook to breathe in the world around you.

Writing becomes beautiful when it becomes specific, concrete.

Here's the secret of writing: there is no secret.

When someone you love dies, you get a big bowl of sadness put down in front of you, steaming hot. You can start eating now, or you can let it cool and eat it bit by bit later one. Either way, you end up eating the whole thing. There's really no way around it.

When students write from experience, they can breathe those specifics into their writing- dialect, odd smells, precise names of plants- that can animate even the most tired and tedious text.

You don't learn to write by going through a series of preset writing exercises. You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you.

Good writing happens when human beings follow particular steps to take control of their sentences-to make their words do what they want them to do.