Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a wordprocessor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?

But the essential question is, “Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?” Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.

If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.

When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. “Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?

~ Doris Lessing, On Not Winning the Nobel Prize

What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?

Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

Don’t be afraid, the darkness you’re in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body, they are two darknesses separated by a skin. I bet you’ve never thought of that, you carry a darkness about with you all the time and that doesn’t frighten you . . . my dear chap, you have to learn to live with the darkness outside just as you learned to live with the darkness inside.

- José Saramago

Don’t make thoughts something more than what they are.  They’ll rise to the challenge and before too long you’ll forget they’re thoughts and decide they’re you. Cut that off at the pass. [...] Stay awake and they won’t run your life. Fall asleep and you’ll find yourself wondering where your life went and who was in charge while you were gone.

- Laraine Herring, The Writing Warrior

Sometimes it seems like every dysfunctional thing we do has its roots in fear of death. I’m tired of looking at my feet; I want to see the sky again.

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

In order to change the character’s sex, I first search-and-replaced the male name with a female name, and then reversed all the pronouns. I expected this would create some jarring moments, but I didn’t expect them to show up in the first three paragraphs.

As I read the part of the story where my newly minted female character first appears on stage, I was struck with an almost overwhelming urge to describe her physically. Nowhere in the previous version of the story did I physically describe her male incarnation – no height, no weight, no haircut, no musculature, no eyes, no lips, no nothing — and yet now that her sex had changed, I felt intensely compelled to add markers of physical description. The role of this newly minted female character was to be the same as the earlier male’s role, her function in the story and the scene exactly the same (in the scene where she first shows up, she’s counting money – pretty gender neutral behavior) and yet now I had this intense urge to describe her black bobbed hair. Interesting, no?

Having come face to face with this strange reptilian urge, I’ve decided to fight it. I’m leaving her physically undescribed. If the male didn’t need it, then presumably the female doesn’t either.

- Paolo Bacigalupi