‘Do you find sentences fascinating?’

Dinty W. Moore of Brevity Magazine, in The Review Review: I have a standard answer for folks who ask me, “Do you think I should be a writer?” Or “Do you think I can succeed as a writer?” My answer is, “Do you find sentences fascinating?” That’s what it comes down to in the end. It is a good thing to live a rich life full of experiences, it is a good thing to have boundless curiosity about what drives people, it is a good thing to be disciplined, it is a good thing to see the world from interesting angles rather than straightforwardly and predictably, but after all of that — and all of that is important — you are alone in your room, changing and changing and restoring and reversing and starting sentences all over again, trying to decide “How do I capture this thought, feeling, scene, action on the page so that it pierces the reader’s awareness?” If you find that latter process – at the level of word choice, the phrase, the sentence — fascinating, addictive even, then you’ll get where you want to be as a writer, eventually. I know that sounds dramatic, but it is what I believe.

This is pulled from The Unslanted Truth: a Conversation With Four Editors of Today’s Premier Creative Nonfiction Literary Magazines. The four editors were Moore, Hattie Fletcher of Creative Nonfiction, Donna Talarico of Hippocampus Magazine and Sarah Wells of River Teeth Journal.