Writing Classes with The Writer's Workshop

“One false word, one extra word, and somebody's thinking about how they have to buy paper towels at the store.”

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced…the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.