Latitude Living

By QueSeraSara

Women Writers

My partner Kathy has relished spending time this week with a couple of her visiting writer friends. I've enjoyed overhearing them talking "shop" -- impressed with their passion and sympathetic to their common struggles.

"I didn't plan on either children or writing. Once I realized that writing satisfied me in some enormous way, I had to make adjustments. The writing was always marginal in terms of time when the children were small. But it was major in terms of my head. I always thought that women could do a lot of things. All the women I knew did nine or ten things at one time. I always understood that women worked, they went to church, they managed their houses, they managed somebody else's houses, they raised their children, they raised somebody else's children, they taught. I wouldn't say it's not hard, but why wouldn't it be? All important things are hard."
~ Toni Morrison

"Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences."
~ Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

"E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard."
~ Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
~ Maya Angelou

"I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else."
~ Virginia Woolf

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