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Write for Your Life
From the #1 New York Times bestselling novelist and author of A Short Guide to a Happy Life comes an inspiring book that shows us how anyone can write, and why everyone should.
Write for Your Life is a guide for those who don't, won't, or think they can't write, what Anna Quindlen calls "civilians." Using examples past, present and future--from Anne Frank to Toni Morrison to members of her own family--Quindlen makes vivid all the ways in which writing connects us, to ourselves and to those we cherish. From love letters written after World War II to journal reflections from nurses and doctors today, and using her personal experiences not just as a writer but as a mother and daughter, Quindlen makes the case that recording our daily lives in an enduring form is more important than ever. All of our histories, of current events and personal challenges, can be understood and passed down through the written word; "to write the present," Quindlen says, "is to believe in the future." Write for Your Life is a clarion call to pick up the pen, and find yourself.
Write for Your Life is a guide for those who don't, won't, or think they can't write, what Anna Quindlen calls "civilians." Using examples past, present and future--from Anne Frank to Toni Morrison to members of her own family--Quindlen makes vivid all the ways in which writing connects us, to ourselves and to those we cherish. From love letters written after World War II to journal reflections from nurses and doctors today, and using her personal experiences not just as a writer but as a mother and daughter, Quindlen makes the case that recording our daily lives in an enduring form is more important than ever. All of our histories, of current events and personal challenges, can be understood and passed down through the written word; "to write the present," Quindlen says, "is to believe in the future." Write for Your Life is a clarion call to pick up the pen, and find yourself.
3 pages, Audiobook
First published April 12, 2022
352 people are currently reading
6172 people want to read
About the author
Anna Quindlen
86 books4,758 followersAnna Marie Quindlen is an American author, journalist, and opinion columnist.
Her New York Times column, Public and Private, won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. She began her journalism career in 1974 as a reporter for the New York Post. Between 1977 and 1994 she held several posts at The New York Times. Her semi-autobiographical novel One True Thing (1994) served as the basis for the 1998 film starring Meryl Streep and Renée Zellweger.
Her New York Times column, Public and Private, won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. She began her journalism career in 1974 as a reporter for the New York Post. Between 1977 and 1994 she held several posts at The New York Times. Her semi-autobiographical novel One True Thing (1994) served as the basis for the 1998 film starring Meryl Streep and Renée Zellweger.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 433 reviews
August 30, 2022
Audiobook….read by Anna Quindlen
….3 hours and 19 minutes.
Where’s the frosting on the cake? The cherry on top of the ice cream sundae?
Or the cake or the ice cream at all?
What readers get for the kindle ebook - $12.99 - or audiobook-
$14.70 -
is a diluted and reduced ‘quickie’ about writing for yourself, your sadness, your past, your future, your joy, your solace.
There are a few examples and stories that any ‘civilian‘ non-writer - could write.
I suppose that was the point!
Anyone can write for themselves - practice and not necessarily to publish.
It’s certainly nowhere near as
powerful, informative, insightful, or inspiring as Stephen King’s book “On Writing”.
…A little chatter about poetry. …Collected flea market love letters.
…A pregnant medical student who watched a pregnant woman die. The sadness was overwhelming and the pregnant medical student started writing all through her years of her medical training.
A little chatter about technology: pros and con.
A very slim book in size and substance.
….3 hours and 19 minutes.
Where’s the frosting on the cake? The cherry on top of the ice cream sundae?
Or the cake or the ice cream at all?
What readers get for the kindle ebook - $12.99 - or audiobook-
$14.70 -
is a diluted and reduced ‘quickie’ about writing for yourself, your sadness, your past, your future, your joy, your solace.
There are a few examples and stories that any ‘civilian‘ non-writer - could write.
I suppose that was the point!
Anyone can write for themselves - practice and not necessarily to publish.
It’s certainly nowhere near as
powerful, informative, insightful, or inspiring as Stephen King’s book “On Writing”.
…A little chatter about poetry. …Collected flea market love letters.
…A pregnant medical student who watched a pregnant woman die. The sadness was overwhelming and the pregnant medical student started writing all through her years of her medical training.
A little chatter about technology: pros and con.
A very slim book in size and substance.
July 27, 2022
I adore Anna Quindlen but I wasn’t that enthusiastic about reading this book, until I was reading the first page. I had the Kindle edition (and the hardcover edition) and the Overdrive audio edition. Quindlen reads the book. If she hadn’t I wouldn’t have been interested in the audio edition. Given that it was read by the author I loved it. It was almost as good as the few times I got to see her speak in person. It still wouldn’t have worked for me if I hadn’t been also simultaneously reading the words on the page/screen. I think she must have taped this at home during the pandemic. It’s not quite professionally done. There are weird scratchy sounds in-between sections. I actually didn’t love the narration in that she emoted too much as though the reader wouldn’t be able to imagine so for themselves but when I pictured her talking and imagined myself at a talk, then I did enjoy it. I needed the words on the screen/page though!
This is brilliant. I love the mish mash of all that was included about writing. I found all the people’s stories and examples used interesting. I enjoyed the chatty writing style.
When I read about drafts though whatever interest in writing the book inspired went away again. I just don’t enjoy the writing process, especially if I can’t “get it right” without having to edit, redo, etc. I was interested to read that the author feels the same way I do about rewrites and edits: not enthusiastic.
The hardcover edition has blank pages as the end for readers to start writing. I would love to own a hardcover edition of this book. I can see rereading it and I can see giving it as a gift.
4-1/2 stars
This is brilliant. I love the mish mash of all that was included about writing. I found all the people’s stories and examples used interesting. I enjoyed the chatty writing style.
When I read about drafts though whatever interest in writing the book inspired went away again. I just don’t enjoy the writing process, especially if I can’t “get it right” without having to edit, redo, etc. I was interested to read that the author feels the same way I do about rewrites and edits: not enthusiastic.
The hardcover edition has blank pages as the end for readers to start writing. I would love to own a hardcover edition of this book. I can see rereading it and I can see giving it as a gift.
4-1/2 stars
April 25, 2022
This is a book that is a little different from your usual author's instructions on writing. Don't look for Quindlen's information on how she writes, where she gets ideas or how she has made it to the top of her career as both essayist, and novel writer. This book is to encourage the reader to write and includes essays on topics from handwritten letters, the importance of personal history and leaving a trace of yourself through journals and the written word. She talks a little of her beginnings but mostly this is a look outward rather than in. I listened to the audio which she reads herself and enjoyed hearing her thoughts even when I disagreed with them. If you need some encouragement to get you writing in whatever form or just want an easy listen that will get you thinking about writing and all the written word entails in the current times it is an easy and enjoyable listen. 3.5 rounded up.
December 29, 2021
I won a copy of this in a Goodreads giveaway. This fast read is a treasure. Quindlen digs deep—while providing numerous examples—of why writing is important for the heart, mind, and spirit, and also to document history. In journals, letters, novel drafts…write it down!
May 23, 2022
This is a quick, easy read that might inspire you to write about your life experiences and feelings, even if you think it's for your eyes only. The book has nothing to do with the mechanics and grammar of writing. It's just ideas and stories about ordinary people just like you who wrote letters and kept journals. There is value in recording what you have lived through, even if it seems common and dull. Hint: Your children and grandchildren will not find it boring. They will be grateful to have a chance to know you in a different and lasting way, long after you are gone.
December 5, 2021
What a great book full of helpful information. Write for Your Life argues that there has never been a more important time to stop and record what we are thinking and feeling. Using examples from past, present, and future—from Anne Frank to Toni Morrison, from love letters written after World War II to journal reflections from nurses and doctors today—
A great book. Thanks Anna Quindlen.
A great book. Thanks Anna Quindlen.
March 5, 2023
Write for Your Life reveals the innumerable ways that writing connects us to the world and each other. The author talks about why she believes everyone should document their life in words—whether they consider themselves a writer or not. It also convinces us of why the gesture of hand writing a letter can be more powerful than the words themselves. The book promotes hand writing instead of typing it in on the computer.
Writing can do a lot for us. It can also be very therapeutic. She reminds us that Anne Frank's Diary is not a book. It's her writing down her intimate thoughts on a historical event. And it's powerful. A quote in the book said, "Writing is the gift of your presence forever...Think of it this way. If you could look down right now and see words on paper from anyone on earth or anyone who has left it, who would that be? And don't you, as do I, wish that person had left such a thing behind? Doesn't that argue for doing that yourself?"
To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at:
https://zibbyowens.com/transcript/ann...
Writing can do a lot for us. It can also be very therapeutic. She reminds us that Anne Frank's Diary is not a book. It's her writing down her intimate thoughts on a historical event. And it's powerful. A quote in the book said, "Writing is the gift of your presence forever...Think of it this way. If you could look down right now and see words on paper from anyone on earth or anyone who has left it, who would that be? And don't you, as do I, wish that person had left such a thing behind? Doesn't that argue for doing that yourself?"
To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at:
https://zibbyowens.com/transcript/ann...
April 19, 2022
I needed this. She said three words that sum up what you need to do to write: butt in seat. Sit yourself down and just write. Write for yourself. Write to leave something behind for your loved ones. Write about the mundane things in life and the great things. Write letters. I listened to this on a long car drive and it made me want to pull over and write on the side of the road.
January 28, 2023
Such a good examination of why we write...
April 19, 2022
If you picked up this book in need for encouragement to write, this one is for you.
Anna is pretty convincing giving you examples how writing can serve as a therapy, testament of our actions or art of deeper communication. The book ends without giving any tools, steps or guidance, it leaves you, alone with a question and no answer - How to convert all this excitement about writing in to action, squeeze it in to our day-to-day routine and make it last?
Anna is pretty convincing giving you examples how writing can serve as a therapy, testament of our actions or art of deeper communication. The book ends without giving any tools, steps or guidance, it leaves you, alone with a question and no answer - How to convert all this excitement about writing in to action, squeeze it in to our day-to-day routine and make it last?
August 9, 2022
I loved this book so much. The power and importance of recording your life and experiences. I think about what a treasure it would be if my parents had documented their lives. I’ll be journaling some of my own memories and writing letters more often now.
February 6, 2023
“When you write, you connect with yourself, past, present and future”
Think about that quote for a moment.
This book is a gift. Whether you are a beginning writer or a veteran, Anna Quindlen’s words about the necessity of writing will speak to you. I read it one sitting and I’m sure I’ll return to it again and again. Quindlen addresses personal writing, journal writing and the lost art of letter writing. She talks about writing for various audiences, especially yourself and your loved ones. She talks about the reasons to write, the effects of writing on the writer and on others. I read this book with pen in hand, marking ideas for myself and my writing students, highlighting memorable quotes. I’ve always been among Quindlen’s loyal readership of her fiction; in fact, she’s one of the writers who inspired me to write fiction. BUT her nonfiction always seems to put words, and eloquent words at that, to my unrefined thoughts. This is a book I will read with my students and buy for others in an effort to pay it forward. Read this book as a gift to yourself. I’m sure glad I did. 💫✍️💛💫
Think about that quote for a moment.
This book is a gift. Whether you are a beginning writer or a veteran, Anna Quindlen’s words about the necessity of writing will speak to you. I read it one sitting and I’m sure I’ll return to it again and again. Quindlen addresses personal writing, journal writing and the lost art of letter writing. She talks about writing for various audiences, especially yourself and your loved ones. She talks about the reasons to write, the effects of writing on the writer and on others. I read this book with pen in hand, marking ideas for myself and my writing students, highlighting memorable quotes. I’ve always been among Quindlen’s loyal readership of her fiction; in fact, she’s one of the writers who inspired me to write fiction. BUT her nonfiction always seems to put words, and eloquent words at that, to my unrefined thoughts. This is a book I will read with my students and buy for others in an effort to pay it forward. Read this book as a gift to yourself. I’m sure glad I did. 💫✍️💛💫
March 26, 2022
Write for Your Life
by Anna Quindlen
Pub Date 12 Apr 2022
Random House Publishing Group - Random House, Random House
Self-Help
I am reviewing a copy of Write For Your Life through Random House and Netgalley:
In Write For Your Life, Anna Quindlen asks these questions truly lasts in our hearts and minds? Where can we find community, history, humanity? In this new lyrical book, the answer is clearly shown, and that is, it’s through writing. This is a book for what Quindlen calls “civilians,” those who want to use the written word to become more human, more themselves.
Write For Your Life shows us that there has never been a more important time to stop and record what we are thinking and feeling. Using examples from past, present, and future—from Anne Frank to Toni Morrison, from love letters written after World War II to journal reflections from nurses and doctors today—Write for Your Life vividly illuminates the ways in which writing connects us to ourselves and to those we cherish. Drawing on her personal experiences not just as a writer but as a mother and daughter, Quindlen makes the case that recording our daily lives in writing is essential.
I give Write For Your Life five out of five stars!
Happy Reading!
by Anna Quindlen
Pub Date 12 Apr 2022
Random House Publishing Group - Random House, Random House
Self-Help
I am reviewing a copy of Write For Your Life through Random House and Netgalley:
In Write For Your Life, Anna Quindlen asks these questions truly lasts in our hearts and minds? Where can we find community, history, humanity? In this new lyrical book, the answer is clearly shown, and that is, it’s through writing. This is a book for what Quindlen calls “civilians,” those who want to use the written word to become more human, more themselves.
Write For Your Life shows us that there has never been a more important time to stop and record what we are thinking and feeling. Using examples from past, present, and future—from Anne Frank to Toni Morrison, from love letters written after World War II to journal reflections from nurses and doctors today—Write for Your Life vividly illuminates the ways in which writing connects us to ourselves and to those we cherish. Drawing on her personal experiences not just as a writer but as a mother and daughter, Quindlen makes the case that recording our daily lives in writing is essential.
I give Write For Your Life five out of five stars!
Happy Reading!
May 15, 2022
Write for your Life is a short, quick book about why recording the moments of daily life is essential. Anyone and everyone should be writing more letters, stories, novels, etc. either by hand, typewriter, or computer - whatever feels right. Anna Quindlen's tone and style felt like a warm hug from an English professor, and I felt that she insightfully touched on specific examples across a diverse set of historical figures -- Langston Hughes to Toni Morrison to Anne Franke.
She covers the benefits of writing (even about the boring, mundane parts of life), and how it can make memory concrete; which is important since memory is a hard thing to hold on to. It also helps us put shape and form around difficult emotions such as disappointment, frustration, jealousy, etc. which can make them easier to manage. In this busy day and age, people don't write meaningful content nearly enough -- and I think we could solve a lot of problems and gain mental clarity and a deeper sense of connection if we wrote more and shared it with one another.
Lastly, the print is set in Fournier type face which felt like an elegant type choice since it feels semi-representative of the time periods for certain historical references made in the book.
------------------------------------------------------
"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
"But when you've written something by hand, the only person who could have done it is you. It's unmistakable you wrote this, touched it, laid hands and eyes upon it. Something written by hand is a piece of your personality on paper."
She covers the benefits of writing (even about the boring, mundane parts of life), and how it can make memory concrete; which is important since memory is a hard thing to hold on to. It also helps us put shape and form around difficult emotions such as disappointment, frustration, jealousy, etc. which can make them easier to manage. In this busy day and age, people don't write meaningful content nearly enough -- and I think we could solve a lot of problems and gain mental clarity and a deeper sense of connection if we wrote more and shared it with one another.
Lastly, the print is set in Fournier type face which felt like an elegant type choice since it feels semi-representative of the time periods for certain historical references made in the book.
------------------------------------------------------
"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
"But when you've written something by hand, the only person who could have done it is you. It's unmistakable you wrote this, touched it, laid hands and eyes upon it. Something written by hand is a piece of your personality on paper."
March 30, 2023
I couldn't make up my mind. To "rate" a book on why writing is indispensable, beautifully written by one of the best journalists and writers alive today -- it's so difficult. This really was a wonderful book on why writing is so important - and why writing isn't just for those who do so with the intention of publication.
Anna Quindlen has been a favorite of mine for decades now. This was an interesting and lyrical read, it really was. After listening to her interviewed by Zibby Owens (podcast: Moms Don't Have Time to Read --- check it out, it's phenomenal), I ordered "Write for Your Life" immediately.
For anyone who writes for a living, journals, or writes for purely therapeutic purposes, this is an amazing book. I highly recommend it.
Anna Quindlen has been a favorite of mine for decades now. This was an interesting and lyrical read, it really was. After listening to her interviewed by Zibby Owens (podcast: Moms Don't Have Time to Read --- check it out, it's phenomenal), I ordered "Write for Your Life" immediately.
For anyone who writes for a living, journals, or writes for purely therapeutic purposes, this is an amazing book. I highly recommend it.
October 18, 2023
Another good one, I will never tire of this woman!
November 3, 2022
I've enjoyed Anna Quindlen's writings ever since I first read her OpEds in the local paper. Her style is straightforward and her advice very worthwhile: writing is essential. In this short work she discusses, Anne Frank's diary, use of journals in the medical profession, the importance of teaching cursive writing, and the educational controversy over process vs skill. The overall message is that it is important to write your story, both for you and for future generations.
January 24, 2024
“We cringe; we read. Is this really who we once were? Yes, it is.”
“Or sometimes, even sadder, we must read between the lines. Some diary entries can reflect a fantasy of adolescence, filled with friends and so very much fun, when from the safe vantage point of maturity it is possible to remember too the misery, the insecurity. There’s no question that at various times we lie to ourselves when we write.”
“Literacy had once been a way of keeping people in their place, poor people, enslaved people, immigrants. For centuries only the rich or highly educated could read, write, and so have a voice. When literacy was democratized, it changed everything because the voices of the few and the privileged were supplanted by a chorus of the many, from many walks of life. People used words, not simply for treatises or sacred texts but to connect with others like themselves, who might not be learned but were certainly human. Writing was a kind of handshake or embrace: Hello, I see you. I want to know and understand you. I want to understand myself.”
“She was young and idealistic, and she decided that one way for her students to survive, to learn, to succeed, was to see their own stories on the page.”
“‘I took away everything that would have been a distraction,’ she recalls, ‘spelling, punctuation, grammar. It was reckless abandon.’”
“Erin’s students were supposed to move on to other teachers, other classes, at the end of that first year, but in a way they had stopped being an English class and become a writing community…Erin managed to stay with this group of students for four years….their journals became the confidants of kids who had a lot to talk about and no one to talk with.”
“In these pages I hoped my children would find me when I was gone.”
“The fact is, the books are only collections of words; the motto of the nun who founded the order that educated me as a girl, Cornelia Connelly, was ‘Actions not words.’ The fallacy in that quote is that words [are] actions. They punch, tear, hurt, harm, soothe, amuse, educate, illuminate. They express ideas and feelings, and they make people feel better, and they move them to tears, and they enrage them, and they define them.”
“[Writing] is speech, observation, and understanding put down in concrete form…the fact is that everyone can do it, not just those who do it as a profession.”
“‘My students were damaged and broken,’ Erin Gruwell recalls. ‘Their lives show the power of words. Writing can allow you to write a different ending to your life.”
“When Anne’s father returned, the only member of his family to survive, he was given the diaries and was amazed at what his daughter had done.”
“Across decades and borders, across race and religion, writing connected the kids from Long Beach, who began their time in Erin Gruwell’s class with no knowledge of the Holocaust, with the girl from Amsterdam who died because of it.”
“For those students, many of them held hostage by diminished expectations and family tumult, what the diary told them was that it was possible to be in a dreadful situation and find a respite from events through putting down words…The power of the pen was that instead of destroying, wounding, it created, healed.”
“The original Freedom Writers, now decades removed from the teenagers they were in room 203, have talked to Erin Gruwell about how reading those early diary entries allows them to revisit the people they once were and consider how different are the people they have become. They were young when they wrote those entries, and now they are adults, and so they can pay forward what they wrote, and therefore what they learned. They can share that path with their own children because they took the time to record it. They can show their own children that writing offers a way to understand your heart and mind.”
“Words can resonate through generations for all of us.”
“A girl keeps a diary, and someday, perhaps after she has grown old and passed on, her daughter finds it. And there is that young woman, alive again on the page. As E.T. says to Elliott at the end of the movie, putting a gnarled finger on the boy’s forehead, ‘I’ll be right here.’”
“Her voice soft and warm and a little plaintive, she added, ‘Writing is the gift of your presence forever.’”
“Think of it this way: If you could look down right now and see words on paper, from anyone on earth or anyone who has left it, who would that be? And don’t you, as do I, wish that person had left such a thing behind? Doesn’t that argue for doing that yourself, no matter how terrifying or impossible writing May sometimes seem? It doesn’t really matter what you say. It matters that you said it. The gift of your presence forever.”
“Barry Jenkins, the director responsible for the movies ‘Moonlight’ and ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ spoke during an interview about his work on the film adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel ‘The Underground Railroad.’ He said that for one pivotal scene when the camera would be panning the faces of his actors, the direction he gave them was simple: ‘Show me yourselves.’ That’s what a journal asks of a writer. Show me yourself.”
“But the liberating thing about a journal is that in most cases it is only for you. Why hide yourself from yourself?”
“Yet people still knit, and bake, and read, perhaps because in each case there is something slow, satisfying, and personal about it.”
“But in an age when we can pass along information with the push of the send button, a letter, especially a handwritten letter, becomes something different. It is something uncommon, something that arrives and makes its recipient feel special. It may even become an artifact.”
“Oh, how I miss letters. They constituted a kind of occasion, the envelope with my name and address and sometimes that old chestnut “SWAK” on the flap: sealed with a kiss. I once sat on the curb at the beach house waiting for the letters to arrive from my school friends elsewhere, letters simultaneously fragile and full, light to hold but stuffed with a sense of the girls I was missing….I guess I always figured there would be more letters, endless letters. But there aren’t.”
“Letters are different today than they were when they were a necessity. In the twenty-first century I do not send a letter because I want to tell you something. I so it because I want to give you something, something personal and long-lasting. There’s a reason why we always envision a cache of letters tied up with a ribbon. It’s because they are a gift.”
“There’s something about the time it takes to write a letter, send it off, wait for a reply, that feels mindful, purposeful.”
“It’s been too easy for my children to bounce short messages back and forth all day long, like a communications tennis match.”
“In writing a letter, we are often required to slow down, or we slow ourselves down to get it right, particularly if we’re writing to someone important to us.”
“There’s no letter saying she’s leaving for the States, and of course none once she’s arrived and call Harry a palooka in person.”
“We can only imagine the reunion! But we can imagine it, because of what’s been written down. After I finished reading those letters, I started to consider how different it would have been if the two had met during other times.”
“But for those two little girls, now grown women, [those letters] constitute an important part of the story of their lives.”
“All of those people would surely like to receive a long email but might more thoroughly appreciate a thoughtful reflection on what they have meant to you, on paper, by hand…Sometimes we assume people know how we feel, and then when we actually put it down in words, we realize how gratitude, appreciation, and love take on a larger, more lasting meaning when they are in concrete form.”
“It is blessed to write a letter, and to find it years later, and to know that, amidst the haste of existence, you yourself took the time to do something that meant so much.”
“The experience has lived inside the doctor ever since, and took her to a place she did not expect and yet embraces.”
“‘It was not my routine to write to publish,’ she says, ‘but to process.’ In a career in which lifesaving is often the goal, she believes that writing helps save her emotional life…”
“If your patient dying of prostate cancer reminds you of your grandfather, who died of that disease last summer, and each time you go into the patient’s room, you weep for your grandfather, you cannot write that in the hospital chart. We will not let you. And yet it has to be written somewhere…”
“In my life the times that I am most myself are when I am in the middle of a paragraph…Exposed, revealed, opened up. I want to open something up in the students I see.”
“Over the years they have covered so much ground, so feelingly.”
“Someday you will look at that class schedule, buried in the bottom of a box somewhere, and be able to see what courses you took. But will you be able to revive the feeling of who you were then?”
“I don’t remember exactly what was said, or who did the wheedling, but Peter wasn’t the kind of person you could wheedle, and when they came to take his typewriter away, he said no.”
“But in many ways technology also seems to have narrowed a worldview for many people, serving up only stories they already believe and opinions they always agree with.”
“You find yourself in a chat room with the sense of being connected when, at the moment of truth, you realize instead that you are alone, nose metaphorically pressed to the glass of the computer screen, in a peculiar kind of populated solitude.”
“Our language has widely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone…But that second assumes the element of choice; take that out of the equation and you have what many people may feel, even in pretty places and comfortable homes.”
“Something about an entity that is everywhere makes it feel as if it is really nowhere at all. That may be one reason why people are so painfully confessional, or so scathingly mean, online. It’s not like it’s really real. Kids used to be able to leave that behind at the end of the day, to shut the bedroom door on meanness. There is no safe place in a wired world.”
“Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.”
“It’s not simply that we cannot say we are finished until the work is the way we want it; we are afraid to even begin if we don’t envision eloquence on the horizon.”
“The thing is, writing is part of a chain. We spin words, for ourselves, a few others, or even the world, out of the past—not just our own, but those of the writers we have read and absorbed.”
“‘We’re not just talking about writing,’ says Eidman-Aadahl. ‘It’s about someone caring what you’re talking about, someone telling you you have something to say that’s worth hearing.’”
“‘I don’t know what you want here,’ the student said. ‘I want what you want to give me,’ the teacher replied.”
“One extensive study of writing instruction in schools found that out of thousands of assignments, only one in five ‘represented extended writing of a paragraph or more; all the rest consisted of fill-in-the-blank and short-answer exercises, and copying of information directly from the teacher’s presentations—activities that are best described as writing without composing.’ The truth is, writing without composing is stenography. Hardly the sort of work that will unearth trauma or celebrate joy or, at the very least, lead a young person to want to confide in a journal or compose a letter to a loved one.”
“I feel so strongly about teaching creative writing in schools for one simple reason: I am a writer because of teachers. When I was in eighth grade, a very erudite nun named Mother Mary Ephrem looked up from one of my papers and said, ‘You are a writer.’ I am a writer because, time and again, I handed in a paper and was told that it was good—publishable, by the standards of that one inventive educator.”
“The memoirs of writers, the behavior of friends, make clear that time and place for writing is like anything else, like whether you’re an early-to-bed person or a night owl: It is highly individual. So don’t make how it’s done an excuse. How it’s done is how you do it.”
“…surviving day by day, never dreaming that by doing so she will help some of us survive, too. She’s not really writing the story of the Holocaust, although that’s what she illuminates. She’s telling the story of one small and unremarkable life that has come to stand for millions of others, and so became remarkable.”
“So what if your story of a small, unremarkable life is read only by you, in some quiet corner, or by one or two people you love and trust to understand? If those are people who can learn from and value it, isn’t that a notable achievement, a valuable audience?”
“Sometimes people will tell me something I wrote made them feel less alone. But the fact is, I feel less alone when I write as well.”
“One of the Freedom Writers, who was homeless as a child and has written about the feelings of despair and shame, wrote ten years out of school about sharing his work with others: ‘Every time I tell my story, I reopen the wound and relive my childhood. What helps me persevere isn’t the pity people feel for me, or the praise and congratulations at the end. It is when I look into the audience and recognize the familiar pain in someone’s face as he or she connects to my story.’ So true, what he says: The process is not always easy, but the result is sometimes invaluable.”
“Somehow we have come to believe that if we are good at something it will not be difficult; that there will not be false starts, bad results, frustration, anguish. A natural, people say admiringly, and what they mean is hard things done with seeming ease, and therefore apparently without effort. I’m not sure why anyone believes this, because the notion is absurd, and not just in writing. A surgeon becomes a great surgeon by years of concentrated effort, attention, repetition. An Olympic medalist does the same routine over and over and over again. The cookbook doyenne Ina Garten, who is considered the queen of the simple, luscious meal, has a catchphrase: ‘How easy is that?’ But in an interview she once said, ‘I find cooking hard.’ She tests recipes many times, and then has assistants test them as well. It can be easy for you because it was laborious for her.”
“Or, as the novelist E.L. Doctorow said once when I told him I was going out on a book tour, ‘Oh, now you will have to pretend you know how we do what we do.”
“The ordinary stories are sometimes the most illuminating of our lives because the simply factual can lead us to the deeply philosophical. They allow us to stop time, to preserve not only who we are but who we once were.”
“Writing is a hedge against forgetting, forgetting forever.”
“The person he had once been was alive in those pages. What a gift he had left behind for those he loved! As I read that essay, I wept, not simply because of what she had lost—the journals just stop one day, and never resume—but for what I had never had.”
“In classrooms, in seminars, in books, it [history] is too often something to memorize and too seldom something to feel a part of.”
“The history people need, to understand where we have come from, what to decry and what to prize, is not a history of presidents or generals. It is the history of us, and one reason ordinary people must write is to leave their own records, to furnish the rooms of our country and our world.”
“Writing is power. Enslaved people were intentionally kept powerless. And if they could write down the facts of their lives, the casual violence, the division of families, the lists on which they appeared as property alongside furniture and rugs, what might they say?”
“And yet a personality sometimes bursts forth.”
“This is history, small-bore but indelible. This is life. If only William Dunwoody had sat down with paper and pen and told it whole…I bet he had a book inside him, that man.”
“A good novelist knows that sometimes the stuff of everyday life is the bedrock of a book a reader can walk through and live in. But the kind of people who actually live those everyday lives may feel they are not worthy of a story. They are just going to work, making meals, diapering babies, getting by, which is a kind of history but not the kind we’ve learned to record, to value, to commit to paper.”
“‘You should write all this down,’ I said, and she waved a hand as though she were waving the words away. ‘I am not a writer like you,’ she said.”
“E.L. Doctorow once famously said of writing a novel, ‘It’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’”
“‘Women have constituted the most spectacular casualty of traditional history. They have made up at least half the human race; but you could never tell that by looking at the books historians write. The forgotten man is nothing to the forgotten woman.’”
“This is as much a part of history as when the territory it joined the union: perhaps more, because it comes alive in a way that a date seldom does, just as the experiences of that Somali woman who refused to write because she did not think of herself as a writer might say more about immigration than laws or statistics.”
“If those unaccustomed to the act of everyday writing can find ways to recover that urge to sit down and produce thoughts, musings, letters for their children, their friends, the future, we will not only know what happened during their lifetimes, we will know how it felt.”
“Or sometimes, even sadder, we must read between the lines. Some diary entries can reflect a fantasy of adolescence, filled with friends and so very much fun, when from the safe vantage point of maturity it is possible to remember too the misery, the insecurity. There’s no question that at various times we lie to ourselves when we write.”
“Literacy had once been a way of keeping people in their place, poor people, enslaved people, immigrants. For centuries only the rich or highly educated could read, write, and so have a voice. When literacy was democratized, it changed everything because the voices of the few and the privileged were supplanted by a chorus of the many, from many walks of life. People used words, not simply for treatises or sacred texts but to connect with others like themselves, who might not be learned but were certainly human. Writing was a kind of handshake or embrace: Hello, I see you. I want to know and understand you. I want to understand myself.”
“She was young and idealistic, and she decided that one way for her students to survive, to learn, to succeed, was to see their own stories on the page.”
“‘I took away everything that would have been a distraction,’ she recalls, ‘spelling, punctuation, grammar. It was reckless abandon.’”
“Erin’s students were supposed to move on to other teachers, other classes, at the end of that first year, but in a way they had stopped being an English class and become a writing community…Erin managed to stay with this group of students for four years….their journals became the confidants of kids who had a lot to talk about and no one to talk with.”
“In these pages I hoped my children would find me when I was gone.”
“The fact is, the books are only collections of words; the motto of the nun who founded the order that educated me as a girl, Cornelia Connelly, was ‘Actions not words.’ The fallacy in that quote is that words [are] actions. They punch, tear, hurt, harm, soothe, amuse, educate, illuminate. They express ideas and feelings, and they make people feel better, and they move them to tears, and they enrage them, and they define them.”
“[Writing] is speech, observation, and understanding put down in concrete form…the fact is that everyone can do it, not just those who do it as a profession.”
“‘My students were damaged and broken,’ Erin Gruwell recalls. ‘Their lives show the power of words. Writing can allow you to write a different ending to your life.”
“When Anne’s father returned, the only member of his family to survive, he was given the diaries and was amazed at what his daughter had done.”
“Across decades and borders, across race and religion, writing connected the kids from Long Beach, who began their time in Erin Gruwell’s class with no knowledge of the Holocaust, with the girl from Amsterdam who died because of it.”
“For those students, many of them held hostage by diminished expectations and family tumult, what the diary told them was that it was possible to be in a dreadful situation and find a respite from events through putting down words…The power of the pen was that instead of destroying, wounding, it created, healed.”
“The original Freedom Writers, now decades removed from the teenagers they were in room 203, have talked to Erin Gruwell about how reading those early diary entries allows them to revisit the people they once were and consider how different are the people they have become. They were young when they wrote those entries, and now they are adults, and so they can pay forward what they wrote, and therefore what they learned. They can share that path with their own children because they took the time to record it. They can show their own children that writing offers a way to understand your heart and mind.”
“Words can resonate through generations for all of us.”
“A girl keeps a diary, and someday, perhaps after she has grown old and passed on, her daughter finds it. And there is that young woman, alive again on the page. As E.T. says to Elliott at the end of the movie, putting a gnarled finger on the boy’s forehead, ‘I’ll be right here.’”
“Her voice soft and warm and a little plaintive, she added, ‘Writing is the gift of your presence forever.’”
“Think of it this way: If you could look down right now and see words on paper, from anyone on earth or anyone who has left it, who would that be? And don’t you, as do I, wish that person had left such a thing behind? Doesn’t that argue for doing that yourself, no matter how terrifying or impossible writing May sometimes seem? It doesn’t really matter what you say. It matters that you said it. The gift of your presence forever.”
“Barry Jenkins, the director responsible for the movies ‘Moonlight’ and ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ spoke during an interview about his work on the film adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel ‘The Underground Railroad.’ He said that for one pivotal scene when the camera would be panning the faces of his actors, the direction he gave them was simple: ‘Show me yourselves.’ That’s what a journal asks of a writer. Show me yourself.”
“But the liberating thing about a journal is that in most cases it is only for you. Why hide yourself from yourself?”
“Yet people still knit, and bake, and read, perhaps because in each case there is something slow, satisfying, and personal about it.”
“But in an age when we can pass along information with the push of the send button, a letter, especially a handwritten letter, becomes something different. It is something uncommon, something that arrives and makes its recipient feel special. It may even become an artifact.”
“Oh, how I miss letters. They constituted a kind of occasion, the envelope with my name and address and sometimes that old chestnut “SWAK” on the flap: sealed with a kiss. I once sat on the curb at the beach house waiting for the letters to arrive from my school friends elsewhere, letters simultaneously fragile and full, light to hold but stuffed with a sense of the girls I was missing….I guess I always figured there would be more letters, endless letters. But there aren’t.”
“Letters are different today than they were when they were a necessity. In the twenty-first century I do not send a letter because I want to tell you something. I so it because I want to give you something, something personal and long-lasting. There’s a reason why we always envision a cache of letters tied up with a ribbon. It’s because they are a gift.”
“There’s something about the time it takes to write a letter, send it off, wait for a reply, that feels mindful, purposeful.”
“It’s been too easy for my children to bounce short messages back and forth all day long, like a communications tennis match.”
“In writing a letter, we are often required to slow down, or we slow ourselves down to get it right, particularly if we’re writing to someone important to us.”
“There’s no letter saying she’s leaving for the States, and of course none once she’s arrived and call Harry a palooka in person.”
“We can only imagine the reunion! But we can imagine it, because of what’s been written down. After I finished reading those letters, I started to consider how different it would have been if the two had met during other times.”
“But for those two little girls, now grown women, [those letters] constitute an important part of the story of their lives.”
“All of those people would surely like to receive a long email but might more thoroughly appreciate a thoughtful reflection on what they have meant to you, on paper, by hand…Sometimes we assume people know how we feel, and then when we actually put it down in words, we realize how gratitude, appreciation, and love take on a larger, more lasting meaning when they are in concrete form.”
“It is blessed to write a letter, and to find it years later, and to know that, amidst the haste of existence, you yourself took the time to do something that meant so much.”
“The experience has lived inside the doctor ever since, and took her to a place she did not expect and yet embraces.”
“‘It was not my routine to write to publish,’ she says, ‘but to process.’ In a career in which lifesaving is often the goal, she believes that writing helps save her emotional life…”
“If your patient dying of prostate cancer reminds you of your grandfather, who died of that disease last summer, and each time you go into the patient’s room, you weep for your grandfather, you cannot write that in the hospital chart. We will not let you. And yet it has to be written somewhere…”
“In my life the times that I am most myself are when I am in the middle of a paragraph…Exposed, revealed, opened up. I want to open something up in the students I see.”
“Over the years they have covered so much ground, so feelingly.”
“Someday you will look at that class schedule, buried in the bottom of a box somewhere, and be able to see what courses you took. But will you be able to revive the feeling of who you were then?”
“I don’t remember exactly what was said, or who did the wheedling, but Peter wasn’t the kind of person you could wheedle, and when they came to take his typewriter away, he said no.”
“But in many ways technology also seems to have narrowed a worldview for many people, serving up only stories they already believe and opinions they always agree with.”
“You find yourself in a chat room with the sense of being connected when, at the moment of truth, you realize instead that you are alone, nose metaphorically pressed to the glass of the computer screen, in a peculiar kind of populated solitude.”
“Our language has widely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone…But that second assumes the element of choice; take that out of the equation and you have what many people may feel, even in pretty places and comfortable homes.”
“Something about an entity that is everywhere makes it feel as if it is really nowhere at all. That may be one reason why people are so painfully confessional, or so scathingly mean, online. It’s not like it’s really real. Kids used to be able to leave that behind at the end of the day, to shut the bedroom door on meanness. There is no safe place in a wired world.”
“Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.”
“It’s not simply that we cannot say we are finished until the work is the way we want it; we are afraid to even begin if we don’t envision eloquence on the horizon.”
“The thing is, writing is part of a chain. We spin words, for ourselves, a few others, or even the world, out of the past—not just our own, but those of the writers we have read and absorbed.”
“‘We’re not just talking about writing,’ says Eidman-Aadahl. ‘It’s about someone caring what you’re talking about, someone telling you you have something to say that’s worth hearing.’”
“‘I don’t know what you want here,’ the student said. ‘I want what you want to give me,’ the teacher replied.”
“One extensive study of writing instruction in schools found that out of thousands of assignments, only one in five ‘represented extended writing of a paragraph or more; all the rest consisted of fill-in-the-blank and short-answer exercises, and copying of information directly from the teacher’s presentations—activities that are best described as writing without composing.’ The truth is, writing without composing is stenography. Hardly the sort of work that will unearth trauma or celebrate joy or, at the very least, lead a young person to want to confide in a journal or compose a letter to a loved one.”
“I feel so strongly about teaching creative writing in schools for one simple reason: I am a writer because of teachers. When I was in eighth grade, a very erudite nun named Mother Mary Ephrem looked up from one of my papers and said, ‘You are a writer.’ I am a writer because, time and again, I handed in a paper and was told that it was good—publishable, by the standards of that one inventive educator.”
“The memoirs of writers, the behavior of friends, make clear that time and place for writing is like anything else, like whether you’re an early-to-bed person or a night owl: It is highly individual. So don’t make how it’s done an excuse. How it’s done is how you do it.”
“…surviving day by day, never dreaming that by doing so she will help some of us survive, too. She’s not really writing the story of the Holocaust, although that’s what she illuminates. She’s telling the story of one small and unremarkable life that has come to stand for millions of others, and so became remarkable.”
“So what if your story of a small, unremarkable life is read only by you, in some quiet corner, or by one or two people you love and trust to understand? If those are people who can learn from and value it, isn’t that a notable achievement, a valuable audience?”
“Sometimes people will tell me something I wrote made them feel less alone. But the fact is, I feel less alone when I write as well.”
“One of the Freedom Writers, who was homeless as a child and has written about the feelings of despair and shame, wrote ten years out of school about sharing his work with others: ‘Every time I tell my story, I reopen the wound and relive my childhood. What helps me persevere isn’t the pity people feel for me, or the praise and congratulations at the end. It is when I look into the audience and recognize the familiar pain in someone’s face as he or she connects to my story.’ So true, what he says: The process is not always easy, but the result is sometimes invaluable.”
“Somehow we have come to believe that if we are good at something it will not be difficult; that there will not be false starts, bad results, frustration, anguish. A natural, people say admiringly, and what they mean is hard things done with seeming ease, and therefore apparently without effort. I’m not sure why anyone believes this, because the notion is absurd, and not just in writing. A surgeon becomes a great surgeon by years of concentrated effort, attention, repetition. An Olympic medalist does the same routine over and over and over again. The cookbook doyenne Ina Garten, who is considered the queen of the simple, luscious meal, has a catchphrase: ‘How easy is that?’ But in an interview she once said, ‘I find cooking hard.’ She tests recipes many times, and then has assistants test them as well. It can be easy for you because it was laborious for her.”
“Or, as the novelist E.L. Doctorow said once when I told him I was going out on a book tour, ‘Oh, now you will have to pretend you know how we do what we do.”
“The ordinary stories are sometimes the most illuminating of our lives because the simply factual can lead us to the deeply philosophical. They allow us to stop time, to preserve not only who we are but who we once were.”
“Writing is a hedge against forgetting, forgetting forever.”
“The person he had once been was alive in those pages. What a gift he had left behind for those he loved! As I read that essay, I wept, not simply because of what she had lost—the journals just stop one day, and never resume—but for what I had never had.”
“In classrooms, in seminars, in books, it [history] is too often something to memorize and too seldom something to feel a part of.”
“The history people need, to understand where we have come from, what to decry and what to prize, is not a history of presidents or generals. It is the history of us, and one reason ordinary people must write is to leave their own records, to furnish the rooms of our country and our world.”
“Writing is power. Enslaved people were intentionally kept powerless. And if they could write down the facts of their lives, the casual violence, the division of families, the lists on which they appeared as property alongside furniture and rugs, what might they say?”
“And yet a personality sometimes bursts forth.”
“This is history, small-bore but indelible. This is life. If only William Dunwoody had sat down with paper and pen and told it whole…I bet he had a book inside him, that man.”
“A good novelist knows that sometimes the stuff of everyday life is the bedrock of a book a reader can walk through and live in. But the kind of people who actually live those everyday lives may feel they are not worthy of a story. They are just going to work, making meals, diapering babies, getting by, which is a kind of history but not the kind we’ve learned to record, to value, to commit to paper.”
“‘You should write all this down,’ I said, and she waved a hand as though she were waving the words away. ‘I am not a writer like you,’ she said.”
“E.L. Doctorow once famously said of writing a novel, ‘It’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’”
“‘Women have constituted the most spectacular casualty of traditional history. They have made up at least half the human race; but you could never tell that by looking at the books historians write. The forgotten man is nothing to the forgotten woman.’”
“This is as much a part of history as when the territory it joined the union: perhaps more, because it comes alive in a way that a date seldom does, just as the experiences of that Somali woman who refused to write because she did not think of herself as a writer might say more about immigration than laws or statistics.”
“If those unaccustomed to the act of everyday writing can find ways to recover that urge to sit down and produce thoughts, musings, letters for their children, their friends, the future, we will not only know what happened during their lifetimes, we will know how it felt.”
March 16, 2023
I love Anna Quindlen’s observational writing. In 1995, I was given a collection of her columns on my daughter’s second birthday and have never forgotten the lead paragraph for The Glass Half Empty:
My daughter is two years old today. She is something like me, only better. Or at least that’s what I’d like to think. If personalities had colours, hers would be red.
The column detailed Quindlen’s view of the world as a feminist, a journalist and a mother, noting that she had learned to navigate a world in the 70s and 80s by looking at any opportunities for women as a glass half full. What I never forgot was that, in a scant number of words, she laid out the vast difference in opportunities for her sons and her toddler daughter. My friends and I have learned to live with it, but my little girl deserves better. She has given me my anger back and I intend to use it well.
Fast forward to 2023 and Write for Your Life, where Quindlen is urging all of us to write. Not in anger but to give voice. To help care for ourselves. And offer perspective to others.
This is not Stephen King’s On Writing — a classic and beloved work that has guided and inspired many a would-be author. Quindlen’s push here is for individuals to write and ensure we each become a civilian of the world. Drawing on inspiration from Anne Frank to the Freedom Writers, this tiny tome notes that writing provides the chance to connect with ourselves and each other, to develop compassion and empathy. This in a tech-driven world where the act of personal writing is almost foreign or forgotten. Or at least, it had become so until the pandemic.
Quindlen urges us to write as an antidote to pain or to mark happiness. To understand ourselves or calm our minds. To set out memories or connections for the people we care about today to read in an undated tomorrow. To offer the details for history that go beyond the politics, the trauma or the financial details of the day.
Don’t write to be published, write to help ourselves understand. Or others remember a broader picture. Most of all, she pushes us to write now and rewrite later. Be it a journal, an emotional release of how things went at work or details of an everyday observation. Just write.
This is an inspiring nudge to creative action.
My daughter is two years old today. She is something like me, only better. Or at least that’s what I’d like to think. If personalities had colours, hers would be red.
The column detailed Quindlen’s view of the world as a feminist, a journalist and a mother, noting that she had learned to navigate a world in the 70s and 80s by looking at any opportunities for women as a glass half full. What I never forgot was that, in a scant number of words, she laid out the vast difference in opportunities for her sons and her toddler daughter. My friends and I have learned to live with it, but my little girl deserves better. She has given me my anger back and I intend to use it well.
Fast forward to 2023 and Write for Your Life, where Quindlen is urging all of us to write. Not in anger but to give voice. To help care for ourselves. And offer perspective to others.
This is not Stephen King’s On Writing — a classic and beloved work that has guided and inspired many a would-be author. Quindlen’s push here is for individuals to write and ensure we each become a civilian of the world. Drawing on inspiration from Anne Frank to the Freedom Writers, this tiny tome notes that writing provides the chance to connect with ourselves and each other, to develop compassion and empathy. This in a tech-driven world where the act of personal writing is almost foreign or forgotten. Or at least, it had become so until the pandemic.
Quindlen urges us to write as an antidote to pain or to mark happiness. To understand ourselves or calm our minds. To set out memories or connections for the people we care about today to read in an undated tomorrow. To offer the details for history that go beyond the politics, the trauma or the financial details of the day.
Don’t write to be published, write to help ourselves understand. Or others remember a broader picture. Most of all, she pushes us to write now and rewrite later. Be it a journal, an emotional release of how things went at work or details of an everyday observation. Just write.
This is an inspiring nudge to creative action.
January 7, 2025
Quindlen offers what I think is the best, most real advice on how to write:
Just do it. "Don't get it right, get it written."
This is a book on WHY we should write.
She shares several examples of the power of personal writing. It's a love letter to the act and artifact of writing.
I began 2024 reading my great grandmother's journals. She kept a daily log for over 50 years, and has been gone nearly 50 more.
I begin 2025 with a brand new granddaughter (our first!) and, overcome with joy, I have the urge to start writing again, for her. Anna Quindlen makes a strong case for it.
She discusses journals and diaries, letter writing, writing for posterity, and more.
"writing offers a way to understand your heart and mind."
My daughter recently received a Daisy Award nomination while working at a Naval Hospital overseas. It had a touching written statement from a patient attached.
I want her to read the part of this book on writing for humanity in healthcare, and the Parallel Chart.
Quindlen makes a case for old school, (tangible) writing. She includes interesting history & people who live on through their writing, like Anne Frank. She talks about technology, interacting "with a machine or through a machine, and not truly directly with another human."
"The internet revolution sent the clear message that fast is better than slow. The truth, as any cook can tell you, is that both ways are good, in different places, for different kinds of things."
On handwriting:
"Something written by hand is a piece of your personality on paper."
On changes in writing in education:
"The assignment nowadays, education studies show, is most often short writing that is a slightly chestier version of a multiple-choice question. Instead of "What makes your heart sing? Be detailed and specific," what often passes for a writing assignment instead is, "There were three main causes of the American Revolution. Identify and discuss them."
Writing for The Right Answer vs. writing for prose or creativity.
"I feel so strongly about teaching creative writing in schools for one simple reason: I am a writer because of teachers."
On writing for wellness:
"Writing can lead to reflection, reflection can lead to understanding, understanding can lead to happiness."
This isn't a revelatory read, but one that has the potential to inspire someone to pick up a pen and write. A thank you card. A recipe. A letter. A journal.
I'm sentimental about these things, so the topics are up my alley.
3 stars, I liked it. It had some nice anecdotes that grabbed my attention more than other parts, like the neighbor woman with the guide dog. I live for moments like that.
"We write things down to give them life."
Just do it. "Don't get it right, get it written."
This is a book on WHY we should write.
She shares several examples of the power of personal writing. It's a love letter to the act and artifact of writing.
I began 2024 reading my great grandmother's journals. She kept a daily log for over 50 years, and has been gone nearly 50 more.
I begin 2025 with a brand new granddaughter (our first!) and, overcome with joy, I have the urge to start writing again, for her. Anna Quindlen makes a strong case for it.
She discusses journals and diaries, letter writing, writing for posterity, and more.
"writing offers a way to understand your heart and mind."
My daughter recently received a Daisy Award nomination while working at a Naval Hospital overseas. It had a touching written statement from a patient attached.
I want her to read the part of this book on writing for humanity in healthcare, and the Parallel Chart.
Quindlen makes a case for old school, (tangible) writing. She includes interesting history & people who live on through their writing, like Anne Frank. She talks about technology, interacting "with a machine or through a machine, and not truly directly with another human."
"The internet revolution sent the clear message that fast is better than slow. The truth, as any cook can tell you, is that both ways are good, in different places, for different kinds of things."
On handwriting:
"Something written by hand is a piece of your personality on paper."
On changes in writing in education:
"The assignment nowadays, education studies show, is most often short writing that is a slightly chestier version of a multiple-choice question. Instead of "What makes your heart sing? Be detailed and specific," what often passes for a writing assignment instead is, "There were three main causes of the American Revolution. Identify and discuss them."
Writing for The Right Answer vs. writing for prose or creativity.
"I feel so strongly about teaching creative writing in schools for one simple reason: I am a writer because of teachers."
On writing for wellness:
"Writing can lead to reflection, reflection can lead to understanding, understanding can lead to happiness."
This isn't a revelatory read, but one that has the potential to inspire someone to pick up a pen and write. A thank you card. A recipe. A letter. A journal.
I'm sentimental about these things, so the topics are up my alley.
3 stars, I liked it. It had some nice anecdotes that grabbed my attention more than other parts, like the neighbor woman with the guide dog. I live for moments like that.
"We write things down to give them life."
May 27, 2022
brilliant & necessary 💌
August 13, 2022
Preface
Good short outlooks that show has writing has evolved and in what ways one might go about writing for people in their life- words and messages are not always about publishing- sometimes they are simply about remaining a bit after you are gone, giving the people you love a piece of you to hold or simply to unwind; to pour down all that you can never feel like sharing with another person. After finishing, I was feeling inspired to write, which I guess makes the goal of the book a success.
————————————————————————————
RATINGS:
Knowledge: 2.5 📜📜💫
A fair amount of knowledge
Complexity: ❎ Not complex.
Interest: 3.5 🧚🏻♀️🧚🏻♀️🧚🏻♀️💫
A tiny plastic pool of interest
Overall star rating : 3.5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
It was good, it was almost great.
————————————————————————————
Good short outlooks that show has writing has evolved and in what ways one might go about writing for people in their life- words and messages are not always about publishing- sometimes they are simply about remaining a bit after you are gone, giving the people you love a piece of you to hold or simply to unwind; to pour down all that you can never feel like sharing with another person. After finishing, I was feeling inspired to write, which I guess makes the goal of the book a success.
————————————————————————————
RATINGS:
Knowledge: 2.5 📜📜💫
A fair amount of knowledge
Complexity: ❎ Not complex.
Interest: 3.5 🧚🏻♀️🧚🏻♀️🧚🏻♀️💫
A tiny plastic pool of interest
Overall star rating : 3.5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
It was good, it was almost great.
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March 18, 2024
A love letter to writing...writing letters, journals, stories from your childhood, notes to your friends and family. Quindlen gives modern examples (including pandemic-era ones) of people returning to pen and paper or typewriter, leaving tangible evidence of their thoughts. She offers excellent arguments for going beyond digital writing. I borrowed a copy from the library, but might need to buy this one to reread.
July 9, 2022
There is a saying that goes..."Before you speak, think. Before you think, read." Might it be noted here that writing is thinking? So before you speak, write. Before you write, read.
Read
June 6, 2022In Write for Your Life, prolific author Anna Quindlen encourages virtually everyone to write about their lives: “It doesn’t matter what you say. It matters that you said it.” Quindlen offers examples of how writing provides personal power and a physical connection to the past, present, and future. I especially like the idea of dual charts, the practice of training medical professionals to keep not only a chart of objective, clinical information about their patients but also a narrative, more objective write-up about their feelings and ideas related to the information in the required chart. Those of us not in the medical field can adapt this practice by reflecting on our calendars and to-do lists. Write for Your Life has numerous nuggets that can serve as motivators by posting them in places where developing writers can come across their inspirational messages.
April 19, 2022
Funny that I'm writing this review of Write for Your Life by Anna Quindlen online because that is what, in part, this book covers. The author's latest book discusses writing and how it can help you in many ways. She also talks about how some of the art of writing has been lost due to text messaging, emails, etc. Namely because there remains no easily accessed "history" from letters or journals. This alternately scares me and makes me want to chronicle my life, no matter how inconsequential the events or thoughts.
Anyway, while this is a thoughtful book and cites studies and writing from notable authors, I was a little disappointed. I went into this book expecting maybe more of writing and the arts and skills of it. Maybe even more about how the author approaches writing all of her diverse works and how they differ. This mostly talks about how basically writing can save your life. It did make me consider writing about more of the traumatic events that I've experienced in my life.
If you're not inherently a writer, you may be encouraged to start journaling or writing letters to loved ones, but I wonder if that would alleviate your stress, depression, or whatever negative emotions you're feeling? Studies cite this, including how she mentions medical professionals who can benefit from writing, and, of course, one of the popular self-care suggestions points to journaling. But, as one reviewer wrote, it may not work for you. I can see this. Some people bake, some people play a sport, some hike, some meditate. A written record would be valuable for many reasons, but will others take the time to do it? I would, but I write for a living and use it to work out feelings or frustrations.
Unfortunately, I don't have much more to say about this book, but I consider Anna Quindlen my unofficial mentor. This will not change since she's been an influence since I was in high school in the late 1980s, but I really didn't take much from this book. I do appreciate what she is trying to say, though.
Thank you, Random House Publishing Group – Random House, for an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! It was a pleasure!
Anyway, while this is a thoughtful book and cites studies and writing from notable authors, I was a little disappointed. I went into this book expecting maybe more of writing and the arts and skills of it. Maybe even more about how the author approaches writing all of her diverse works and how they differ. This mostly talks about how basically writing can save your life. It did make me consider writing about more of the traumatic events that I've experienced in my life.
If you're not inherently a writer, you may be encouraged to start journaling or writing letters to loved ones, but I wonder if that would alleviate your stress, depression, or whatever negative emotions you're feeling? Studies cite this, including how she mentions medical professionals who can benefit from writing, and, of course, one of the popular self-care suggestions points to journaling. But, as one reviewer wrote, it may not work for you. I can see this. Some people bake, some people play a sport, some hike, some meditate. A written record would be valuable for many reasons, but will others take the time to do it? I would, but I write for a living and use it to work out feelings or frustrations.
Unfortunately, I don't have much more to say about this book, but I consider Anna Quindlen my unofficial mentor. This will not change since she's been an influence since I was in high school in the late 1980s, but I really didn't take much from this book. I do appreciate what she is trying to say, though.
Thank you, Random House Publishing Group – Random House, for an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! It was a pleasure!
March 9, 2022
Well, nope, not gonna happen—I'm not going to start writing for my life. Anna Quindlen has written a compelling book that may inspire some people to write. I can see that a successful author, someone whose life is words, would strongly advocate for writing. Many people may find benefit in writing; she recounts many instances to support that.
I love to read and can absorb words all day, and I am very glad that authors like to write, but it doesn't go the other way for me.
"...writing is an unacknowledged panacea, a craft that can lead to healthier human beings. Just think if we talked about it more often like that: Writing can lead to reflection, reflection can lead to understanding, understanding can lead to happiness." There are no panaceas.
I love to read and can absorb words all day, and I am very glad that authors like to write, but it doesn't go the other way for me.
"...writing is an unacknowledged panacea, a craft that can lead to healthier human beings. Just think if we talked about it more often like that: Writing can lead to reflection, reflection can lead to understanding, understanding can lead to happiness." There are no panaceas.
April 26, 2022
I will admit that, truthfully, I am an awful journal writer. As a matter of fact, I checked this book out from the public library in hopes it would encourage me to write. I think the quote that stood out the most to me is when Anna Quindlen asks the reader, "If there was anyone who you wished had left a written letter or a journal, who would that be?" (Paraphrased) The first person who comes to mind is my stepmother, who passed away three weeks ago. I would love to have letters from her. If I wish this to be so, wouldn't it behoove me to be more consistent with my journal? Yes, it would, but I use the excuse "Life gets in the way of my writing," or "I don't have time to write in my journal." Quindlen also mentioned how written history is bloodless. It has dates, events, but no every-day-life records of average people's activities. I can remember in school we learned the historical dates and events; it was impersonal. Will the reading of Write for Your Life change me from an awful journal writer to, at least, an average writer? I can only hope that when life rushes up on me, I will take the time to pick up pen and my journal and write about life and my feelings.
April 16, 2022
While Anna Quindlen is one of my favorite writers, this book fell flat and I am still parsing through why; the main flaw is that I never felt the personal connection with her or provided a window into her own writing life, as other writers have done successfully (Natalie Goldberg and Anne Lamott come to mind). Overall it felt a bit superficial in its tone compared to others in this genre.
February 22, 2022
This book does inspire everyone to write - whenever and wherever. The message is redundant throughout, but does allow the reader to think about the possibilities and importance of writing, no matter the situation.
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