Literary Birthday – 8 April – Barbara Kingsolver

Happy Birthday, Barbara Kingsolver, born on 8 April 1955.

Barbara Kingsolver Quotes on Writing

1. The only way to become a writer is to sit still and write.
2. Any writer is well served by learning about the world… The great underestimated source of knowledge for writers is school.
3. I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.
4. I tend to wake up extremely early with words flooding into my brain.  If I don’t get up, they’ll continue to accumulate in puddles, so it’s a relief to get to the keyboard and dump them out.
5. The place where I write, upstairs in our farmhouse, has windows facing into the woods.  The walls are lined with bookshelves.  To avoid distraction, I write on a computer that is not connected to the internet.  (I check email elsewhere in the house.)  My companions in this room are the likes of Virginia Woolf and George Eliot, who peer down at me from the shelves, and a blue fish named Bruno.  They are all very quiet.
6. I spend months or years thinking about the shape of a novel and earning the authority to write it.
7. I struggle with confidence, every time. I’m never completely sure I can write another book.  Maybe my scope is too grand, my questions too hard, surely readers won’t want to follow me here.  A novel is like a cathedral, it knocks you down to size when you enter into it.
8. Pounding out a first draft is like hoeing a row of corn – you just keep your head down and concentrate on getting to the end.  Revision is where fine art begins. It’s thrilling to take an ending and pull it backward like a shiny thread through the whole fabric of a manuscript, letting little glints shine through here and there.
9. I spend my days tasting the insides of words, breathing life into sentences that swim away under their own power, stringing together cables of poetry to hold up a narrative arc.

Read:

1. Interview with Barbara Kingsolver
2. Barbara Kingsolver’s Top 8 Writing Tips

Barbara Kingsolver On Writing & Reading – Advice for a Teacher

Writing and reading are the two best ways humans have invented to participate with the larger world. Everybody in school wants to be popular: it’s so utterly human, to long for self-expression and connection with others. I would point out that writing and reading offer those things, and more. Writing is a kind of social networking in the way that it connects you with other people, but literature asks a bit more from you than Facebook, and offers more mature rewards. A great book can take you anywhere on earth, in the present or the past or the future. It’s the only mode of communication we have that actually lets you become another person by living inside their head, experiencing their problems and hopes. Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin, see it in your mind’s eye and smell it with your mind’s nose!  But forming these images from the printed page is a skill you have to develop when you’re fairly young, I think, or else it’s very difficult to read for pleasure later on. Writing is also a tool you can use your whole life: to help people, make them laugh, change their minds. You can do it for people in faraway countries, even for people who haven’t been born yet. Writing is a way to live forever.

Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her work is sometimes referred to as women’s fiction. Her work focuses on social justice, biodiversity, and the way humans interact with their communities and environments. She is the author of more than 17 books, including The Poisonwood Bible, Pigs in Heaven, and Flight Behaviour. In 2020 she published the poetry collection How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons). In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. After winning for The Lacuna in 2010 and Demon Copperhead in 2023, Kingsolver became the first author to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction twice. Her latest novel is Partita. Her books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and have been adopted into the core literature curriculum in high schools and colleges throughout the United States. She has received numerous other awards, including the National Humanities Medal. In 2000, Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize for Fiction, which supports writers whose works support positive social change. Visit her website and follow her on Instagram.

Source for Quotes On Writing / Source for Image: Writers Write Functions

by Amanda Patterson

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