The imagination needs noodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling, and puttering.
Brenda Ueland
Cats are dangerous companions for writers because cat-watching is a near-perfect method of writing-avoidance.
Dan Greenburg
I actually have quite a tough time with writing, a lot of empty days, not moving on the next sentence. A lot of that.
Ian McEwan (Powells Interview, January 2004)
First, we tell the story to ourselves, to find out what happens next and what goes on there. Or so I feel. It has taken me YEARS to get to this starting point once again, the starting point one always has to get to, where nothing matters except the story and the people in it.
Margaret Laurence, A Letter to Alice Munro, 26 March 1981
Because a writer doesn’t only need the time when he’s actually writing – he or she has got to have time to think and time just to let things work out.
Nadine Gordimer
We all need a certain amount of fallow time. . . Watching the grass grow, sitting on the hillside, staring out the window daydreaming. When we don’t have it, there is a deeper intelligence that won’t come forth.
Sue Bender