Letters to a Young Writer – Colum McCann, 2017

If I hadn’t read so many books on writing, I might have gotten more out of this. A very quick read–short, pithy sentences like strings of aphorisms–which I’ll barely remember tomorrow. I liked the chapter epigraphs, excellent quotations from various writers, most of which were new to me. And this:

And don’t expect–even in fiction–for written things to be true just because they happened. This is no excuse. They have to happen on the page. With rhythm. With style. With a fierce honesty that is true to experience, not to fact.

All writing is imagination. It creates out of dust. Even what they choose to call nonfiction.

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