Louise Erdrich, on writing: How do I do—I don't know. I've—my sisters have seen me. My husband has seen me. My kids have seen me every day, and they don't know how it happens, but I suspect it has to do with a small, incremental persistent insect-like devotion to putting one word next to the next word. It's a very dogged process.I make myself go upstairs, where I write, whenever I can, no matter how—one thing about this is I never have writer's block, because I—if I went up there and I had writer's block, I think I'd lose my mind. You know, I have to get up to my papers and my books and my notebooks. I jot things down all the time. I just keep going.
What if I just put one word after another? Wrote for 5 minutes and then came back to it as necessary? Thought in terms of incremental progress-- not even "progress," really, but incremental writing simply for the sake of writing?
Then writing would not be a monumental task, but instead, something I just love to do and get to do in dribs and drabs here and there 'cause I want to, not toward a goal at all but about the journey....and if and when I arrived somewhere, that would be the exciting side benefit, not the reason for any of it...
