I stare out the window and reflect on the similarity between writing and saving a life and the inevitable failure of one's imagination and one's goals and ambitions to create a character or a life worth saving.
Miriam ToewsRead
A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Writers constantly seek inspiration from their experiences to create stories, driven by an innate urge to narrate.
Miriam Toews highlights the relentless nature of a writer's quest for stories, suggesting that they are continuously processing their experiences and emotions to find narrative threads even when they might not consciously desire to do so. This process is instinctual and pervasive, turning everyday moments into potential material for storytelling, emphasizing how deeply integrated storytelling is in a writer's life.
Themes
WriterStoryInspirationCreativityNarrative
In practice
Example use cases
During a writing workshop, this quote can inspire participants to embrace their life's experiences as potential stories.
More from Miriam Toews
All quotes →My father died beside trees on iron rails... He had 77 dollars on him at the time, and we used the money for Thai takeout because, as my friend Julie says about times like this, 'You still have to eat.'
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When a person becomes a legend, the very thing that makes them human and knowable is killed off, so it's like being killed over and over and over again, for all eternity.
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There are people who are just suicidal, regardless. They are built to self-destruct. It seems, in my family, like a virus that's resistant to any kind of help or care or medication.
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Writing helps me to create order out of chaos and make sense of things. It helps me to understand what I've experienced, what I've felt and seen, so it becomes a little easier to handle. On the other hand, I don't want it to be just a cathartic experience, an outpouring of grief or whatever it is.
Miriam ToewsRead
I had a thought, on the way home from the rock field, that the things we don't know about a person are the things that make them human, and it made me feel sad to think that, but sad in that reassuring way that some sadness has, a sadness that says welcome home in twelve different languages.
Miriam ToewsRead
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