How To Be A Writer: The Map Is the Territory | Literary Hub

We are not ever just writers - we are also sons and daughters of good parents and disappointing parents and we are partners who need to pick up a quart of milk on the way home and parents who crawl into bed with the little ones late at night to admire them when they are still, even though we know we don't have any tiredness to spare. We are students and teachers. We are readers, taking in the universes created by other minds. Our stories and poems and essays are written in and amongst and because of these moments. A scene is not the only thing that takes place in space and time - the writing of that scene takes place in space and time, too. I remember working on a particularly dark section of my first novel, No One is Here Except All of Us, in which the character based on my great-grandmother escapes into the Russian wilderness with her children and survives on tree bark, and it so happened that this writing day took place beside a Southern California hotel swimming pool where my visiting father-in-law was staying. I spent the morning in the shade surrounded by Disneyland-bound families and I wrote about starvation.