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Recently I’ve been coming across extreme insights into writing in the form of random quotations. I will collect them here.

This from the writer Oliver Sacks:

” Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves.”

Form John Irving:

“If you don’t feel you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then what you’re doing probably isn’t very vital. If you don’t feel that you are writing somewhat over your head, why do it? If you don’t have some doubt of your authority to tell this story, then you’re not trying to tell enough.”

From poet Muriel Rukeyser

The universe is made of stories, not atoms.

The pain of writing for me is the horrifying sense that I am producing crap. The background chant in my brain as I work is, “yousuckyousuckyousuckyousuckyousuck ….” But somehow I force myself to keep going, because I know from experience that the ONLY way I have any hope of writing something of any quality at all is by puking out an awful first draft, then rewriting it over and over, slowly comprehending where the holes and errors are, and draft by draft filling, correcting, and only then, finally seeing some actual opportunities to do something good. Now, as a client and I are finishing the final drafts of her book project, she sent me the following quote, which has buoyed me amazingly.

Jack Limpert, former long-time Washingtonian editor, asked me to write something about how I became an editor for his excellent blog, well worth exploring. Here’s my response:

I only ever wanted to write. First I wanted to write fiction, but I discovered I never actually WROTE fiction unless I had a hard deadline for a class. So I went in search of deadlines and joined the college newspaper, where I discovered that I actually preferred finding stories in real-life sets of facts to making stories up out of my head. I was lucky enough to get paid for that, and ten years later I was writing long-form enterprise stories for the Cincinnati Enquirer, which was a good gig, but I wanted to go to a bigger, more ambitious and accomplished paper.

I applied to the Miami Herald feature section, and was disappointed not to get the job. A few months later I got a call from Gene Weingarten, then the number two editor at the Herald’s magazine, Tropic. Weingarten said that the feature editor there had shown him the clips of all the applicants for the feature job and asked his opinion. He said he told them there was no contest: they should hire me. They had ignored his advice, but now he was going to be promoted to Tropic editor, and he needed a number two, and he wanted me to apply. I told him the only editing I had done had been in college, and he said he didn’t care. He said what he really needed in an editor was someone who could write a magazine story himself, who understood what narrative nonfiction required and could take manuscripts from good reporters who didn’t understand that and make them over into full-fledged magazine stories. He said that if I took the job, he would be satisfied only if every story I edited turned out as fully formed as if I had written it myself.

I had always admired Tropic, and Gene’s goal intrigued me. So with some regret at “giving up” writing, I took the job. Within a month I realized that not only was editing for a magazine in many ways as creatively challenging, and satisfying, as writing, it was going to improve my own writing in the bargain. Instead of writing a handful of major narrative projects a year, I was managing the creation of scores of them, from the conception to the reporting to the mapping out and final execution. I was, in effect, getting hundreds of reps for the key writing muscles, as well as benefiting from the more elevated perspective that is the inherent luxury of being an editor — intimate with the guts of the story, but at one remove, a general surveying the gory battle from a hilltop bunker, above the smoke and clamor and fog of war that engulfs the infantry.

In the end, I believe, that after editing for almost 30 years now, I am a better writer than I would have been if I had only been a writer. Also, I may have learned something about editing.

Lately my story idea inspirations have been of the “you know what I’d really like to do . . . ” variety. A year or so ago I was in a Wegman’s basement wine superstore with absolutely no idea how to tell one of the three thousand bottles of wine from any other one and I thought, “You know what I’d really like to do? Bring a master sommelier with me and have, like, $300 to spend on her recommendations.”

More recently I was listening to the Nats on the radio thinking, “You know what I’d really like to do? Spend some time hanging with Charlie Slowes and Dave Jageler to see how they manage to do what they do.”

Both those lovely thoughts turned into magazine stories for the Post magazine. And they were very cool and fun to report. The part I forgot though, was that even dream assignments like the above still have to get written, and the writing, as always, was eye-gougingly painful to do, with long hours down in the funky hollows of the worst self doubt when I cursed myself for ever committing to the dang thing.

You know what I’d really like to do? Get to report on something fabulously cool and NOT have to ever write about it. But still get paid.