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Every moment of your life, you’re writing. Even in your dreams you’re writing. When you walk in the halls in school you meet various people and you write furiously in your head….You see someone you like and you say, hi, in a warm melting way, a Hi that conjures up splash of oars, soaring violins, eyes shining in the moonlight. There are so many ways of saying Hi. Hiss it, trill it, bark it, sing it, bellow it, laugh it, cough it. A simple stroll in the hallway calls for paragraphs, sentences in your head.
-- Frank McCourt
Elizabeth Bishop was an extremely slow writer and published only 101 poems in her lifetime. She worked on her poem "One Art" for more than fifteen years, keeping it tacked up on her wall so that she could rearrange the lines again and again until she got it right. But she was an obsessive letter writer. She once wrote forty letters in a single day. She said, "I sometimes wish that I had nothing, or little more, to do but write letters to the people who are not here." A collection of her letters,
One Art: The Letters of Elizabeth Bishop, was published in 1994. She once wrote, "I'd like to retire ... and do nothing, / or nothing much, forever ... / look through binoculars, read boring books, / old, long, long books, and write down useless notes."
-- The Writer’s Almanac
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