“Writers, remember to take care of yourselves. It ain’t easy being so aware.” — “Meet the Agent,” Writers Digest, March/April 2026, Ericka Tiffany Phillips, literary agent at the Stephanie Tade Agency
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Quiet Writing
“Quiet writing isn’t a genre, it’s more like a style and an approach. For creative nonfiction, it’s narrative that focuses on everyday moments, employs keen observation, and includes details and imagery to demonstrate and investigate the human experience. It reads quiet but still carries the tension and conflict that is fundamental to good storytelling.”
— Andrea A Firth
Excerpted from Quiet Writing: Start with an Everyday Moment, Brevity Blog Post, April 23, 2025
Andrea A. Firth is an editor at Brevity Blog.
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What makes writing memorable?
“Writing That Endures—It’s All in the Craft,”
— Ronnie Blair
Concrete details.
Evocative language.
Characters who seem as human as we are.
Ronnie Blair, “Writing That Endures—It’s All in the Craft,” Brevity Blog, October 17, 2025
Ronnie Blair is the author of the memoir Eisenhower Babies: Growing Up on Moonshots, Comic Books, and Black-and-White TV.
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Sanctuary
“When you take sanctuary within yourself, the world can be falling apart around you and you will be okay.”
— Samantha Rose
“When you take sanctuary within yourself, the world can be falling apart around you and you will be okay.” — “Giving Up The Ghost” by Samantha Rose
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Get Into The Habit
“Forget about inspiration and get into the habit of writing every day. Habit has written far more books than inspiration has. If you want the Muse to visit you, she needs to know where you are: so stay at your desk.”
— Philip Pullman
“Forget about inspiration and get into the habit of writing every day. Habit has written far more books than inspiration has. If you want the Muse to visit you, she needs to know where you are: so stay at your desk.” —Philip Pullman
Quote in “Write it All Down” by Cathy Rentzenbrink.
#justwrite #amwriting #iamawriter
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Hey! I feel like that too.
“Be brave with it. Be brave with the thing that you are most scared to talk about, that is the thing you need to be able to talk about. There are so many tragedies in you and joy in you that need a voice, and you would be so surprised to see that when you voice that thing you are so scared of how many people across the world will go, ‘Hey, I feel like that too. Thank you for putting a voice to how I feel.’”
— Nikita Gill
Quote in “Write it All Down” by Cathy Rentzenbrink.
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First Draft
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”
— Terry Pratchett
Attributed to Terry Pratchett
#amwriting #justwrite #iamawriter
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Wanted: Real Characters
“. . . there’s nothing more glorious than when a fictional character feels completely real. And nothing more meh than when a fictional character feels like a cardboard cut-out”
Excerpt from Forever Workshop
From Marlene: I agree! I love to immerse myself in writing that takes me into another world. I’m not interested in reading what a character looks like and haven’t been able to articulate why until I read this by Jo Gatford:
“I usually don’t give much of a crap what a character looks like, unless there’s a particular physical attribute, gesture, or way they move that helps show who they are. So dive deep and look for a line that gives us a guts-first impression of your fictional person.”
From Workshop Your WIP — Introduce Your Protagonist with ONE Line, By Jo Gatford
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A Prayer for the World
“Let the rain come and wash away
— Rabbi Harold Kushner
the ancient grudges, the bitter hatreds
held and nurtured over generations.
Let the rain wash away the memory
of the hurt, the neglect.
Then let the sun come out and
fill the sky with rainbows.
Let the warmth of the sun heal us
wherever we are broken.
Let it burn away the fog so that
we can see each other clearly.
So that we can see beyond labels,
beyond accents, gender or skin color.
Let the warmth and brightness
of the sun melt our selfishness.
So that we can share the joys and
feel the sorrows of our neighbors.
Let the earth, nourished by rain,
bring forth flowers
to surround us with beauty.
And let the mountains teach our hearts
to reach upward to heaven.”
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When is writing done?
“Even after a poem has hardened into print, it may continue to represent a risk, a chance, a surmise, or a hypothesis about itself.”
— Mary Kinzie
Mary Kinzie. A Poet’s Guide to Poetry, U Chicago Press
Thank you, Sonoma County Poet Laureate, Dave Seter, for letting me know about Mary Kinzie.
Dave’s response to Mary’s quote:
“What this means to me is, a piece of writing is never truly ‘done’ so instead of worrying so much about whether it is ‘done,’ we should share our writing with each other even when it feels a little raw, because there is power in the original idea and sometimes it takes time for the words to catch up with the idea.”
#justwrite #iamwriting #iamawriter