What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it and not lose too much time and too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people.

Art-making both awakens and fulfills basic spiritual needs, Rilke says, and that this role is ultimately sufficient.

A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity.

Out of the cacophony of writing advice out there, Rilke stands alone in emphasizing love as the central creative force in our work.  We must love our doubt, love our solitude, love the questions, love our subject, and make love our subject.  Even suffering in the creative process is worthy of love:

Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you?

To Rilke the soul of a creative project is tender, solitary, and full of potential.  Only those readers who treat it with love are worth listening to.

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.  Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.

At the heart of Rilke’s letters is unabashed faith in the writer’s inner world.  Who else treats that silent life with such respect?

I do only want to advise you to keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.

Who among us doesn’t benefit from this reminder?  We each have within us a potent, generative life-force that feeds our creative work, and attending this is the foundation of all art-making.  That said, I’ll sign off to enter that lovely private sphere.

Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

No, I wasn’t.

I knew immediately Heather saw an equation I hadn’t:  Elizabeth minus writing equals misery.  Solitude, a pen and paper were key to my mental health.  From that moment forth writing has been an essential activity, saving me thousands in therapy bills.  (Thank you, Heather.)  Not that writing solves all my problems, but it does return me to a place where I can hear what I’m thinking and feeling and thus address my problems sanely.  It takes the scattered pieces inside me and binds them up.

Twenty-two years and three published books later, I sometimes forget this basic function of writing:  To return me to myself.  The distractions are different today; parenthood, sure, but also competition in the literary world, the terrible demands of social media, a career built on creative work that nonetheless seems feeble and unsteady.  Were Heather to ask me her question now I would answer, blithely, yes, and my answer would be a tiny bit dishonest.  I’m not always faithful to that fundamental function of writing.  I sometimes forget to write to become more myself.  And when that happens, I lose my moorings.

I believe—in fact, I know—that writing to become more me is the groundwork of every successful piece I’ve put into the world.  When I write to put my internal pieces together, I’m also rearranging external pieces and creating a whole beyond myself.  This isn’t a distraction from my literary ambitions but rather the essential first step.  It’s also the second and fifth and final steps, only it gets harder and harder to remember.

But now I can conjure up Heather.  She’ll squint her eyes at me and demand daily, “Are you writing?”

But in reality writers, to varying degrees, can’t help but pay attention to language from the start.  On one extreme are writers who must perfect each sentence before continuing to the next.  While this method works for some, I wouldn’t recommend it as it poses far too many opportunities for a new writer to get stuck.  Most of us grow attached to sentences we’ve polished and this attachment interferes with our ability to remain flexible and open-minded.  It’s hard to fundamentally restructure an entire book or to lop off a chapter that took you six months to write when all the sentences are beautiful.

On the other extreme are blessedly sloppy drafters who spew out text, trusting that revision will tighten their prose.  I know writers who, when unable to conjure up the right word, insert asterisks instead.  Preserving the flow of ideas is too important; the right word can arrive later.  When we’re not attached to particular words, it’s easier to play with the large elements that form a work—structure, character, themes, plot, voice…

Most writers fall between these two extremes.  We try to stay loose but can’t help but consider our word choices.  Luckily, language is quirky; just as a strong working title can give direction to a draft, the right word can also unlock material.  An accurate description can reveal to the writer a character’s nature or the truth about a memory.  Precision in word choice can expose new ideas worth exploring. There are benefits to occasionally slowing or even stopping one’s “flow” to deliberate over language.

We don’t always know which words or sentences are worthy of careful construction early on and which are distractions from the hard work of composing.  Only much later will we discover which passages are germane—which is why it’s always wise to keep a repository for cut passages.  Generally, though, staying alert to our motives keeps us on track.  Is a particular quest for accurate language motivated by genuine questions about the content?  If so, our work with language reveals the heartbeat and is worth pursuing early on.  Is our struggle with language about presenting material to the reader?  If so, consider tackling this work later.  Better find the core of your story first and then polish the surface.