“After high school, I went back to my country and I found out that my grandfather wrote a journal entry every day, and since he has passed away, it was cool to sit with my cousins and read his life story.”
“Getting workshop feedback… is basically a little bit like plugging your nose, and diving into a pool and then having a chorus of people singing at you underwater, and you can’t breathe or talk, or anything.”
“I hope that as we learn to be writers and scholars that we are reminded that if this doesn’t feel right, this set of conventions for writing this paper doesn’t feel right, know that it’s not the only way to express yourself. Not to think of writing as ‘a’ thing but lots of things.”
“Up until fairly recently (shhh), I didn’t know how to use semicolons. I would always just avoid them and use commas instead. I would say it’s a writing style.”
“From my students, I usually get feedback that, ‘she’s not a native speaker and that’s why she understands what we are struggling with.’ It’s not the overwhelming majority, but in many cases, they appreciate that (especially maybe in writing since it’s not speaking or pronunciation) they really appreciate that understanding.”
“Ultimately, what you have to write is worth writing. It might not be worth publishing according to other people, but it’s worth writing, worth putting those words out into the world, and worth putting it down on paper for you to use later.”
“I hate writing an abstract when I don’t have a paper to write it from. They’re very useful, but coming up with what you’re going to say before you’ve said it is difficult.”
“I love haikus and sonnets, but free verse is my specialty just cuz I don’t like structure. I also enjoy writing short stories, but I usually just come up with them off the top of my head.”
“The challenging thing about fiction and creative nonfiction is the vulnerability of it, and just being brave enough to spill what you’re thinking about onto a page, and hand it to someone else.”
“…I enjoy being able to find what it is that I don’t know and then practically understand it and be able to turn that into my own words and write about it.”
“We need to read and discuss and share and support writers who don’t traditionally get that space. So it might be you know writers of color, women writers, poor writers, international writers, or novice writers. We just need to broaden what we think about when we think about who deserves to be read.”
“The feedback I consistently get is ‘you know the dark and stormy night approach has some problems and it’s a lot better if you just state your intentions as soon as possible, every single time.’ I’ve gotten better at that, but that’s one of the things that just keeps coming up.”
“Right now I’m working on a project for Your Juicery that entails researching and writing nutritional facts and benefit to display on the wall panels of the store. I like this work because it allows me to see the progression of the project from start to finish.”
“There’s a beginning point, and an endpoint. You may have to go 7 different directions before you get there, but you will get there eventually if you just keep working on it.”
“I think that what makes a good writer good is knowing that you need to become better and to accept and be open to constructive criticism. And to not only accept it but to yearn for it.”
“What is it that Thomas Mann says? ‘A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.’ I think that that’s definitely true, and that’s probably something that more students especially need to know.”
“My new book looks at how women in the 17th century thought about the globe. Part of my argument is that scholars tend to not think about how women would be theorizing the world because women were seen as outside those kinds of discourses.”
“In the past, it was more just practicing my writing and becoming familiar with writing a research paper. Now, I’m trying to make this project have an impact.”
On painful, true writing: “I want that pain as of now, because that’s important to the entire process. Otherwise it’s not authentic. Then it becomes trite for me.”
“To emotionally or psychologically encourage myself when I have low motivation, or writer’s block, I try to write all of the advice or compliments I get from my senior professors or from my mentors regarding my writing.”
“I love writing, but I need an outline. I want to sketch. I want structure. I don’t want to feel like I’m stepping off a cliff. I want my road map once I’m sitting down to officially [write].”
“I don’t think of my writing as particularly creative, but I write to communicate and convey information, not to convey feelings or thoughts like a book.”
“Maybe that’s even a broader message: not just coveting time, but building support networks that allow for you to withdraw so that you can immerse yourself in your work and emerge on the other side with your stories.”
“Writers get so serious with our writing, but I think it’s good to step down and say, if you were a child writing right now, where would you go with this?”
“I think all writers relate to the experience of having an idea in your head that seems great–completely developed, interesting, ready to go–and then trying to write it down on the page and having it come off flat and boring, or just being unable to find the words at all.”
“I have always had a mindset that I don’t have to read to become a good writer, I just have to write. But I’m realizing that that’s not the case. I really have to read a lot of material in order to become a good writer.”
“It’s about giving yourself the time to reflect and think about what you are going to say and how you are going to say it, before you even touch a piece of paper or the computer.”
“It wasn’t until I started being more active with reading the news, reading books, watching documentaries, listening to podcasts, that I could tell my writing was starting to get better. Because not only was it in more informed, but I was kind of a sponge, starting to take in other people’s writing.”
“When I came to the States, I never knew if my professor would think my writing was good or not. I never know what the expectations are for a Ph.D. student in the U.S.”
“A really hard thing to convey to students that I am working with is that it’s okay to be raw; it’s okay to express it however because that authenticity is what makes [us] connect with other people.”
“In my mind I’ll have one thought, and five minutes later it’s something completely different, but once you put it on the page, it’s just there. It can’t change.”
“A quote that sticks with me is that ‘prose is architecture, not interior decoration.’ I like that idea. First and foremost, writing should be as clear as possible. Writing is communicating – the words shouldn’t get in the way.”
“Computers I think have driven us to more, not less writing. And part of this is being comfortable with that and seeing that all writing is important.”
“For my poetry thesis I’m writing about humanity and monstrosity and where the line is blurred, where it intersects, and how these two things affect our daily lives.”
“In my senior year of high school, I had an AP English teacher that didn’t like my style of writing. He called my writing choppy. I would go to him and ask, ‘Why is this choppy? Explain to me how I fix this.’ He couldn’t articulate that for me.”
