On Writing ~

"It took many years of writing, thousands of pages, to discover that I could not find the fit between experience and record by writing with 'summing up' words.  To say that a canoe trip was wonderful, and that the river was beautiful, and that I had many adventures accomplished nothing in the journal:  I didn't even have the pleasure of reliving the best moments while writing about them.  And yet this ingrained tendency to generalize I still have to fight daily.  A journal filled with 'nices,' wonderfuls,' 'terribles,' and 'interestings' is one drained of any live juice.  If that kind of writing merely reflects habit, there is hope for change.  If the writer insists on it, consider it a sign of a deep-seated fear of the real."

~ Hannah Hinchman, A TRAIL THROUGH LEAVES, The Journal As A Path to Place/An Inspiration to journal-keepers and commonplace-book-makers everywhere, W.W.Norton & Company, 1997.

"The act of writing regularly tends to solve that problem on its own, though.  In such narrow confines we bore ourselves, and don't bother rereading passages because we know they won't recall the flavor of the moment.  After a while, we begin groping for something more, the magical formula that will make experience live on the page.
     The best way to avoid the trap of dead words is to keep a firm grip on the real stuff, prickly, slimy, or bony as it may be.  The vitality of the body and the senses can get smothered by the language we encounter daily. . ."