The only way to learn to write is by writing. That would not be a useful approach to brain surgery. Because that is the way it is done. Compulsive diligence is almost enough. But not quite. You have to have a taste for words. Gluttony. You have to want to roll in them. You have to read millions of them written by other people.
You read everything with grinding envy or a weary contempt. You save the most contempt for the people who conceal ineptitude with long words, Germanic sentence structure, obtrusive symbols, and no sense of story, pace or character.
The you have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.
Okay, then. Stupendous diligence, plus word-love, plus empathy, and out of that can come, painfully, some objectivity.
Never total objectivity.
At this frangible moment in time I am typing these words on my blue machine, seven lines down from the top of my page two is this introduction, knowing clearly the flavour and meaning I am hunting for, but not at all certain I am getting it.
- John D. Macdonald

I feel in touch… “I was in a meeting today and I was day dreaming, a pool of words, like a spaghetti of words, but it was clear and the strings were black.