Best-selling writer Marilynne Robinson offers tips to aspiring, emerging and established writers. In a wide-ranging interview, New York Times Magazine writer Wyatt Mason encourage Robinson to share some of her secrets. Some of her advice was targeted specifically at writers, while some had more universal appeal. For example:
“There was a very strong tendency among people to be kind of isolated,” she said. “More hermits per capita than you’d find in most places. We were positively encouraged to create for ourselves minds we would want to live with. I had teachers articulate that to me: ‘You have to live with your mind your whole life.’ You build your mind, so make it into something you want to live with. Nobody has ever said anything more valuable to me.”
Here is more from Mason: This June, as a grandfather clock rang the quarter-hour in her modest Iowa City living room, the American novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson, a woman of 70 who speaks in sentences that accumulate into polished paragraphs, made a confession: “I hate to say it, but I think a default posture of human beings is fear.” Perched on the edge of a sofa, hands loosely clasped, Robinson leaned forward as if breaking bad news to a gentle heart. “What it comes down to — and I think this has become prominent in our culture recently — is that fear is an excuse: ‘I would like to have done something, but of course I couldn’t.’ Fear is so opportunistic that people can call on it under the slightest provocations: ‘He looked at me funny.’ ”
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