Sunday, October 08, 2006

Nikki Giovanni on Writing from Experience

Nikki Giovanni on writing from experience:

Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

Quoted in Sophy Burnham, For Writers Only (1994).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

But where do we get empathy? Experience. ;)

Kelly said...

Ooh! Very nice quote. I read for empathy as well.