Reference
Writing, Research & Publishing Guides
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Write for Your Life
In this clarion call to pick up a pen and find yourself from "one of our most astute chroniclers of modern life" (The New York Times Book Review), #1 New York Times bestselling author Anna Quindlen shows us how anyone can write, and why everyone should.
What really matters in life? What truly lasts in our hearts and minds? Where can we find community, history, humanity? In this lyrical new book, the answer is clear: through writing. This is a book for what Quindlen calls "civilians," those who want to use the written word to become more human, more themselves.
Write for Your Life argues that there has never been a more important time to stop and record what we are thinking and feeling. Using examples from past, present, and future-from Anne Frank to Toni Morrison, from love letters written after World War II to journal reflections from nurses and doctors today-Write for Your Life vividly illuminates the ways in which writing connects us to ourselves and to those we cherish. Drawing on her personal experiences not just as a writer but as a mother and daughter, Quindlen makes the case that recording our daily lives in writing is essential.
When we write we not only look, we see; we not only react but reflect. Writing gives you something to hold onto in a changing world. "To write the present," Quindlen says, "is to believe in the future."
What really matters in life? What truly lasts in our hearts and minds? Where can we find community, history, humanity? In this lyrical new book, the answer is clear: through writing. This is a book for what Quindlen calls "civilians," those who want to use the written word to become more human, more themselves.
Write for Your Life argues that there has never been a more important time to stop and record what we are thinking and feeling. Using examples from past, present, and future-from Anne Frank to Toni Morrison, from love letters written after World War II to journal reflections from nurses and doctors today-Write for Your Life vividly illuminates the ways in which writing connects us to ourselves and to those we cherish. Drawing on her personal experiences not just as a writer but as a mother and daughter, Quindlen makes the case that recording our daily lives in writing is essential.
When we write we not only look, we see; we not only react but reflect. Writing gives you something to hold onto in a changing world. "To write the present," Quindlen says, "is to believe in the future."
Editorial Reviews
"I have been fortunate enough to experience firsthand Anna Quindlen's generosity of spirit, thoughtfulness, wisdom, and encouragement, writer to writer. It's a wonderful thing, then, to see all of those qualities presented for writers everywhere in Write for Your Life, an invaluable guide to the hows and whys of expression, whether we're aspiring to make art for the world around us or simply to learn more about our own lives. I'm sure that everyone who ever attempts to string a few words, or a lot of words, together to make some sort of sense will find much education and inspiration in this cherishable volume."-Benjamin Dreyer, author of Dreyer's English
"Highly recommended for those looking for a means of coming to terms with their lives and the world around them."-Library Journal (starred review)
"Inspirational . . . The author's journalistic eye for story and detail breathes life into her literary philosophies."-Publishers Weekly
Praise for Anna Quindlen
"[Quindlen] is one of our most astute chroniclers of modern life."-The New York Times Book Review
"Thank goodness for Anna Quindlen. [She] is smart. And compassionate. And witty. And wise."-Detroit Free Press
"Anna Quindlen is America's Resident Sane Person. She has what Joyce called the common touch, the ability to speak to many people about what's on their minds before they have the vaguest idea what's on their minds."-The New York Times
"Classic Quindlen, at times witty, at times wise, and always of her time."-The Miami Herald
"Quindlen is an astonishingly graceful writer."-San Francisco Examiner
"Highly recommended for those looking for a means of coming to terms with their lives and the world around them."-Library Journal (starred review)
"Inspirational . . . The author's journalistic eye for story and detail breathes life into her literary philosophies."-Publishers Weekly
Praise for Anna Quindlen
"[Quindlen] is one of our most astute chroniclers of modern life."-The New York Times Book Review
"Thank goodness for Anna Quindlen. [She] is smart. And compassionate. And witty. And wise."-Detroit Free Press
"Anna Quindlen is America's Resident Sane Person. She has what Joyce called the common touch, the ability to speak to many people about what's on their minds before they have the vaguest idea what's on their minds."-The New York Times
"Classic Quindlen, at times witty, at times wise, and always of her time."-The Miami Herald
"Quindlen is an astonishingly graceful writer."-San Francisco Examiner
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
Infinitive
...
One Friday in mid-June many years ago, a girl leapt from her bed and went into her parents' room, then downstairs. In the living room her family gathered so that she could open her presents. Thirteen. It's a birthday of moment, the first teenage year, the beginning of becoming a woman and an adult.
Perhaps as a suggestion of that becoming, she was given a brooch. Perhaps as a reflection of her role as the youngest, the child, she was given a jigsaw puzzle and some candy. But the present she liked best was given to her by her mother and father. It was a diary covered in red-and-white plaid cloth. She called it Kitty. On the first page she wrote, "I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great support and comfort to me."
It was 1942. By 1945 the girl would be dead of typhus, murdered really, and Kitty would be on her way to becoming a kind of literary living legend.
The girl was Anne Frank, the daughter of Reform Jews living in Amsterdam. Less than a month after that birthday, Anne took Kitty with her into hiding in an attic area used for storage atop her father's business offices. "The four of us were wrapped in so many layers of clothes it looked as if we were going off to spend the night in a refrigerator," she wrote, "and all that just so we could take more clothes with us. No Jew in our situation would dare leave the house with a suitcase full of clothes."
"It's so amazing," a girl once said to me when I was speaking at a middle school book fair, "that a thirteen-year-old girl was able to write a bestselling book."
What sometimes gets lost, in the many decades since her father first published Anne Frank's diary, in the millions upon millions of copies it has sold in dozens of languages, is that when she first began, Anne Frank wasn't writing a book. She was talking to herself. And she was talking to herself in a way that any of us can do too. She was finding solace in writing her life, her thoughts and feelings, day after day. Words to live by.
Anne Frank was living through an extraordinary experience, an extraordinary time, an extraordinary horror, and to ground herself she was committing everything to paper, much of it not particularly profound. The curtains at the windows, the cupboard to hide the door. She writes about how everyone thinks Anne is badly behaved, about how much she hates algebra and geometry. Eventually she ran out of space in the birthday diary and continued in exercise books and accounting ledgers from the office below. In some ways she sounds like a typical teenager: a mother who doesn't understand her, a boy she wants to be alone with. In others, surely not: the toilet that cannot be flushed for the entire day, the enforced silence to forestall the unexpected footsteps on the stairs, the sound of those footsteps evoking terror because of what the family Frank has heard is happening in the world outside the attic.
But Anne's diary is also instructive about how writing, for anyone, for everyone, for you and for me, can normalize the abnormal and feed the spirit, whether during exceptional moments of history or just ordinary moments of everyday life. For those far along in the span of their lifetimes, writing offers an opportunity to look back, a message in a bottle that says, This was life. This was how it was, this was who I was. For young people like Anne, it's a way of understanding yourself, hearing your own voice, puzzling out your identity.
Journals and diaries were once a given for girls of a certain age; many a woman has cleaned out the childhood bedroom in which she once shut out the world and discovered a world within, within the pages of a forgotten book festooned with flowers or covered in fabric, written in a hand recognizable but perhaps hardened by the years. We cringe; we read. Was this really who we once were? Yes, it is.
In fact it is part of how we discovered who we once were, by writing it down for an audience of one: me, myself, and I. The revelations sidle in and slip out, the parties, the meetups and hangouts. The night of the terrible drunk. The day of the great disappointment. Or sometimes, even sadder, we must read between the lines. Some diary entries can reflect a fantasy of adolescence, filled with friends and so very much fun, when from the safe vantage point of maturity it is possible to remember too the misery, the insecurity. There's no question that at various times we lie to ourselves when we write. I don't imagine there are many mothers who have a baby book that contains musings about unbearable fatigue or the rigors of breastfeeding or the fear of not being c...
Infinitive
...
One Friday in mid-June many years ago, a girl leapt from her bed and went into her parents' room, then downstairs. In the living room her family gathered so that she could open her presents. Thirteen. It's a birthday of moment, the first teenage year, the beginning of becoming a woman and an adult.
Perhaps as a suggestion of that becoming, she was given a brooch. Perhaps as a reflection of her role as the youngest, the child, she was given a jigsaw puzzle and some candy. But the present she liked best was given to her by her mother and father. It was a diary covered in red-and-white plaid cloth. She called it Kitty. On the first page she wrote, "I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great support and comfort to me."
It was 1942. By 1945 the girl would be dead of typhus, murdered really, and Kitty would be on her way to becoming a kind of literary living legend.
The girl was Anne Frank, the daughter of Reform Jews living in Amsterdam. Less than a month after that birthday, Anne took Kitty with her into hiding in an attic area used for storage atop her father's business offices. "The four of us were wrapped in so many layers of clothes it looked as if we were going off to spend the night in a refrigerator," she wrote, "and all that just so we could take more clothes with us. No Jew in our situation would dare leave the house with a suitcase full of clothes."
"It's so amazing," a girl once said to me when I was speaking at a middle school book fair, "that a thirteen-year-old girl was able to write a bestselling book."
What sometimes gets lost, in the many decades since her father first published Anne Frank's diary, in the millions upon millions of copies it has sold in dozens of languages, is that when she first began, Anne Frank wasn't writing a book. She was talking to herself. And she was talking to herself in a way that any of us can do too. She was finding solace in writing her life, her thoughts and feelings, day after day. Words to live by.
Anne Frank was living through an extraordinary experience, an extraordinary time, an extraordinary horror, and to ground herself she was committing everything to paper, much of it not particularly profound. The curtains at the windows, the cupboard to hide the door. She writes about how everyone thinks Anne is badly behaved, about how much she hates algebra and geometry. Eventually she ran out of space in the birthday diary and continued in exercise books and accounting ledgers from the office below. In some ways she sounds like a typical teenager: a mother who doesn't understand her, a boy she wants to be alone with. In others, surely not: the toilet that cannot be flushed for the entire day, the enforced silence to forestall the unexpected footsteps on the stairs, the sound of those footsteps evoking terror because of what the family Frank has heard is happening in the world outside the attic.
But Anne's diary is also instructive about how writing, for anyone, for everyone, for you and for me, can normalize the abnormal and feed the spirit, whether during exceptional moments of history or just ordinary moments of everyday life. For those far along in the span of their lifetimes, writing offers an opportunity to look back, a message in a bottle that says, This was life. This was how it was, this was who I was. For young people like Anne, it's a way of understanding yourself, hearing your own voice, puzzling out your identity.
Journals and diaries were once a given for girls of a certain age; many a woman has cleaned out the childhood bedroom in which she once shut out the world and discovered a world within, within the pages of a forgotten book festooned with flowers or covered in fabric, written in a hand recognizable but perhaps hardened by the years. We cringe; we read. Was this really who we once were? Yes, it is.
In fact it is part of how we discovered who we once were, by writing it down for an audience of one: me, myself, and I. The revelations sidle in and slip out, the parties, the meetups and hangouts. The night of the terrible drunk. The day of the great disappointment. Or sometimes, even sadder, we must read between the lines. Some diary entries can reflect a fantasy of adolescence, filled with friends and so very much fun, when from the safe vantage point of maturity it is possible to remember too the misery, the insecurity. There's no question that at various times we lie to ourselves when we write. I don't imagine there are many mothers who have a baby book that contains musings about unbearable fatigue or the rigors of breastfeeding or the fear of not being c...
