Quote of the Day (Andrea Barrett, on Writing as a Response to the World)

“Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be. Craft guides a writer at every step, as does knowledge of earlier work; we accomplish little without those foundations. Research can help, if it feeds the imagination and generates ideas; a plan is also a wonderful thing, if a writer's imagination works that way. Groping blindly, following glimmers of structure and sound, is far from the only way; other writers work differently to good effect, and any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the pictures form, and where it all begins. “---Andrea Barrett, “The Sea of Information,” in The Best American Essays2005, edited by Susan Orlean (2005)