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“Ultimately you write alone. And ultimately you and you alone can judge your work. The judgment that a work is complete—this is what I meant to do, and I stand by it—can come only from the writer, and it can be made rightly only by a writer who’s learned to read her own work.”
― Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
― Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
“When I am gripped with despair, when I think I might stop, I speak to my dead. Tell them a story. What am I doing with this life? They hold me accountable. I let them make me bolder or more modest or louder or more moving, but I ask them to listen, and then write.”
― How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
― How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“What if the novel in you is one you yourself would never read? A beach novel, a blockbuster, a long, windy, character-driven literary drama that ends sadly? What if the one novel in you is the opposite of your idea of yourself?”
― How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
― How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“I was by now used to people being surprised by me and my background, and their surprise offended me. I was always having to be what I was looking for in the world, wishing the person I would become already existed — some other I before me. I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was.”
― How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
― How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“Something new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can. After it has left mine.
All my life I've been told this isn't important, that it doesn't matter. And yet I think it does. I think it is the real reason the people who would take everything from us say this. I think it's the same reason that when fascists come to power, writers are among the first to go to jail. And that is the point of writing.”
― How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
All my life I've been told this isn't important, that it doesn't matter. And yet I think it does. I think it is the real reason the people who would take everything from us say this. I think it's the same reason that when fascists come to power, writers are among the first to go to jail. And that is the point of writing.”
― How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Kay’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Kay’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
1,132 books
|
40 friends
124 books
|
89 friends
117 books
|
21 friends
124 books
|
77 friends
77 books
|
198 friends
59 books
|
144 friends
1 book
|
34 friends
1 book
|
237 friends
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Kay
Lists liked by Kay
