Britney’s Reviews > Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction > Status Update

“...not only do I forgive myself for writing bad first drafts, I expect myself to write bad first drafts. That’s my baseline assumption. I write my first drafts with the absolute certainty that I’ll either throw them away or that future-me... will correct their many egregious faults later. Either way, it’s not something for present-me to worry about. Filling a blank page is hard enough as it is.” - Lev Grossman

“What’s important is that some initial irritant, some kind of galvanizing and enduring impulse, combines with the need to communicate, to tell stories... leading to inspiration, then that first story, and all that follows after.”

“Nothing is more essential to a writer than sustaining an inquisitive nature—being actively interested in the world and the people in it. Curiosity reflects a willingness to be disappointed in a search for knowledge. Curiosity sends out a series of queries that exist for their own sake, and curiosity gathers back into itself anything that it finds, transforming what’s found in the process.”