A Quote by James Baldwin

When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know. — © James Baldwin
When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.
When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know-and what we don't know-about whatever we're trying to learn.
I think the more that I can find myself getting out of the way - like you said yourself - trying to get out of thinking too much, and sometimes something truly special can happen. That's the beautiful mystery of song writing - that you really don't know where these songs come from exactly, and you don't know how you came up with them - and god bless it that you should have the gift of channeling that.
If there wasn't anything to find out, it would be dull. Even trying to find out and not finding out is just as interesting as trying to find out and finding out; and I don't know but more so.
All writing is that structure of revelation. There's something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don't need to read further if there's nothing else to find out.
Just because you're starting from something which you know - a theory which you know is right and trying to further develop your understand of that theory is maybe a more fruitful thing to do than trying to just throw all that out and start afresh with something more speculative.
A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.
You're trying to write about something that's sacred. You're trying to bring the seriousness of life and death to it, and you're trying to find a way to dramatize it, and you're trying to give language to it, which is inadequate. But it's important to try.
I might be like a conductor, or I collect the stuff together and I do a lot of my own writing. But what is a pleasure is the whole creative thing in which we're all excavating and trying to find something.
I'm very physical. When I'm writing, I'm playing all the parts; I'm saying the lines out loud, and if I get excited about something - which doesn't happen very often when I'm writing, but it's the greatest feeling when it does - I'll be out of the chair and walking around, and if I'm at home, I'll find myself two blocks from my house.
...It's an unmeetable level of writing. But even if it's something I feel like I can't ever attain, it doesn't crush my spirit. I figured out early on that you gotta find your own strengths and hone them rather than trying to emulate something that impresses you.
You know, I'm a total perfectionist, and I labor over trying to get things right. Whether we're putting together an opening for the Masters broadcast or when I was writing with my friend Eli Stillman a book about my dad called 'Always By My Side,' I'm always trying to find a way to do something better.
The one recurring theme in my writing, and in my life in general, is confusion. The fact that anytime you think you really know something, you're going to find out you're wrong - that is the rule. The moments where you think you have something figured out, those are the exceptions.
Everytime a lawyer writes something, he is not writing for posterity, he is writing something so that endless others of his craft can make a living out of trying to figure out what he said. Course perhaps he really haden't said anything, that's what makes it so hard to explain.
I often will write a scene from three different points of view to find out which has the most tension and which way I'm able to conceal the information I'm trying to conceal. And that is, at the end of the day, what writing suspense is all about.
Writing a story I am just trying to find some little interesting thing to start out with: something small, even trivial. Preferably something that doesn't have a lot of thematic or political baggage - a little crumb that is interesting.
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