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

If you want to write poetry, you must have poems that deeply move you. Poems you can't live without. I think of a poem as the blood in a blood transfusion, given from the heart of the poet to the heart of the reader. Seek after poems that live inside you, poems that move through your veins.

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.

Use your notebook to breathe in the world around you.

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.

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.

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