Eric Olsen > Quotes

“Your willingness to explore or confess all that you know about life emotionally. You must render yourself open, maybe painfully so, and deeply interpretive toward your own experience. Writing becomes a personal forensic. Experience, not belief or intellectual conviction, by turns prodigal and indecent and subliminal: that’s what you transfigure and clarify into story. 2.  Your realization of oppositional or pivotal conflict through dramatic dialogue, never exposition, and the nemesis gets the better lines, as in real life. 3.   Your discovery of a resolution that won’t be the same as the one you envisioned when you began.”
― Eric Olsen, We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers' Workshop

“Howard Gruber, a psychology professor at Rutgers, said, “One thing creative people have in common is energy. You frequently find that creative people go for a lot of walks.” “When I sit around with other poets and we talk about the times we feel like writing, often it’s after having done something physical,” Marvin told me. “One of the secrets of life is oxygen; the more you have, the better able you are to do everything, even write a poem.”29”
― Eric Olsen, We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers' Workshop

“Writer’s block comes from one’s wanting only to write good stuff. Well, the good stuff and the bad stuff are all part of the stuff. No good stuff without bad stuff.”
― Eric Olsen, We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers' Workshop