OUT OF SILENCE, SOUND. OUT OF NOTHING, SOMETHING.

Aiming to offer a “kind and gentle” writing guide, Griffin, author of 22 books, takes a Zen-like approach to generating, constructing, and honing a piece of writing. In serene meditations, sometimes less than half a page long, she reflects on topics such as silence, focus, reading, the need for solitude, and the power of attentiveness to one’s surroundings and feelings. Throughout, the author underscores the importance of self-awareness, of being alert to one’s reveries, which “allows the dreamer to pass boundaries and in the process discover new insights.” While she advises setting aside a special time each day for writing, she also touts the benefits of taking a walk in the fresh air. “Creativity,” she has found, “is more like a cat than a dog. You can’t order it to come to you. You just have to make yourself available until…you find it leaping into your lap.” Once ideas have made it onto the page, Griffin advises thinking about word choice, sentence and paragraph structure, transitions, and the power of repetition and metaphors. Passages of memoir recount her development as a writer, beginning with clumsy childhood efforts, and she shares thoughts from a host of writers, including Proust, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, M.F.K. Fisher, Iris Murdoch, Patti Smith, and Lewis Carroll. Alice McDermott cautions, “A sentence that seeks to dazzle is merely annoying. A sentence that dazzles even as it deflects our amazement, graciously leading us to the next, is a sentence worth keeping.” Above all, Griffin encourages all writers to believe in themselves: “When you tell any story, you create a system in which, as with a watershed, every word or sentence reflects and acts upon every other, in a way that, miraculous as it sometimes seems, is never static, but like nature is always evolving, transforming before your very eyes.”

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