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To write is to write.

Be quietOver my years as a writer I’ve learned not to talk about the work when I am in the process of cre­at­ing a sto­ry. The more I talk about the sto­ry, the less it is on paper, so to speak. When I talk about what I am writ­ing, it seems to lock up the free flow of inven­tion. It sti­fles intu­ition. It’s as if I become com­mit­ted to the idea of the sto­ry, rather than to the sto­ry itself. The worst thing I can do is intel­lec­tu­al­ly define the sto­ry. My job is to make the sto­ry come alive in my writ­ing, not in my talk­ing. To talk about the sto­ry implies that what I say is in the sto­ry. For exam­ple, if I say my sto­ry is about an intel­li­gent per­son who makes a fool­ish deci­sion, it doesn’t mean I have writ­ten that. I’ve only talked it. That’s why when some­one asks me what I am writ­ing, I duck away. Indeed, the more some­one tells me what they are going to write, the more cer­tain I am that it will nev­er be writ­ten. To write is to write. The talk can come later.

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