“If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” – Toni Morrison
In response to my last post Christina noted how her search for a door to Narnia led her to start writing. That reminded me of the above Toni Morrison quote.
Sometimes I feel lost. I don’t know what I should be writing. It’s not an absence of ideas, but too many of them swirling around in my cluttered head. I find myself thinking that I should work on the book that would seem most likely to sell, but then I recall this Toni Morrison quote, and am reminded of the fact that the book I need to write is the book that I would be most inclined to read.
There’s a much repeated adage that writers should write what they know. I have issues with this adage, because there are a lot of things that writers simply can’t know. There’s a lot of stuff that you have to make up along the way. I think a better adage might be to write the book you want to write, or as Toni Morrison points out the book you would want to read.
What about you do you have any favorite writing quotes?
My Books
Toni Morrison’s point is a great one.
I just came across a quote today that I loved. Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, wrote an article about being a writer. He talked about how long it took him to write and how he almost gave up. This is a quote from the end of that article: “In my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. Wasn’t until that night when I was faced with all those lousy pages that I realized, really realized, what it was exactly that I am.”
Great quote, and so very true!