With regard to writing, CARA, I think that the most important thing is to relax and not let that blank page intimidate you. Moreover, you never want to try to appear erudite. Use ‘big’ words sparingly, especially when you’re just starting out. The cardinal rule in writing, of course, is: ‘writing is re-writing.’ Almost everyone has a gem of a story to tell, but making Jill an Jack Reader want to read it means telling it in the most natural voice you can muster. So go over it and over it and over it till you’re sick of your own stuff. Yeah, I got published. A couple of short stories, in a lit-mag. I also optioned a screenplay.

Oh, something else: never think your sh– doesn’t stink. When it needs editing, go in like the mad slasher. In my novel, I deleted an entire chapter, except for the first paragraph. You get so it doesn’t even bother you to do this, even though you’ve labored long and hard in writing it.

God bless you and in the words of screenwriter William Goldman, ‘may all your hurts be little ones.’ The writing game is a bitch, but it’s oh-so-rewarding to the soul.

It was at Far Rockaway where this took place. After we had dressed and
eaten a meal I suddenly decided that I wanted to be alone and so, very
abruptly, at the comer of a street. I shook hands and said good-bye. And
there I was! Almost instantaneously I felt alone in the world, alone as one
feels only in moments of extreme anguish. I think I was picking my teeth
absentmindedly when this wave of loneliness hit me full on, like a tornado.
I stood there on the street comer and sort of felt myself all over to see if
I had been hit by something. It was inexplicable, and at the same time it
was very wonderful, very exhilarating, like a double tonic, I might say.
When I say that I was at Far Rockaway I mean that I was standing at the end
of the earth, at a place called Xanthos, if there be such a place, and
surely there ought to be a word like this to express no place at all. If
Rita had come along then I don’t think I would have recognized her. I had
become an absolute stranger standing in the very midst of my own people.
They looked crazy to me, my people, with their newly sunbumed faces and
their flannel trousers and their dock-work stockings. They had been bathing
like myself because it was a pleasant, healthy recreation and now like
myself they were full of sun and food and a little heavy with fatigue. Up
until this loneliness hit me I too was a bit weary, but suddenly, standing
there completely shut off from the world, I woke up with a start I became so
electrified that I didn’t dare move for fear I would charge like a bull or
start to climb the wall of a building or else dance and scream. Suddenly I
realized that all this was because I was really a brother to Dostoievski,
that perhaps I was the only man in all America who knew what he meant in
writing those books. Not only that, but I felt all the books I would one day
write myself germinating inside me: they were bursting inside like ripe
cocoons. And since up to this time I had written nothing but fiendishly long
letters about everything and nothing, it was difficult for me to realize
that there must come a time when I should begin, when I should put down the
first word, the first-real word. And this time was now! That was what dawned
on me.

I used the word Xanthos a moment ago. I don’t know whether there is a
Xanthos or not, and I really don’t care one way or another, but there must
be a place in the world, perhaps in the Grecian islands, where you come to
the end of the known world and you are thoroughly alone and yet you are not
frightened of it but rejoice, because at this dropping off place you can
feel the old ancestral world which is eternally young and new and
fecundating. You stand there, wherever the place is, like a newly hatched
chick beside its eggshell. This place is Xanthos, or as it happened in my
case. Far Rockaway.

There I was! It grew dark, a wind came up, the streets became deserted,
and finally it began to pour cats and dogs. Jesus, that finished me! When
the rain came down, and I got it smack in the face staring at the sky, I
suddenly began to bellow with joy. I laughed and laughed and laughed,
exactly like an insane man. Nor did I know what I was laughing about. I
wasn’t thinking of a thing. I was just overwhelmed with joy, just crazy with
delight in finding myself absolutely alone. If then and there a nice juicy
quim had been handed me on a platter, if all the quims in the world had been
afforded me for to make my choice, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. I had
what no quim could give me. And just about at that point, thoroughly
drenched but still exultant, I thought of the most irrelevant thing in the
world – carfare! Jesus, the bastard Maxie had walked off without leaving me
a sou. There I was with my fine budding antique world and not a penny in my
jeans. Herr Dostoievski Junior had now to begin to walk here and there
peering into friendly and un-friendly faces to see if he could pry loose a
dime. He walked from one end of Far Rockaway to the other but nobody seemed
to give a fuck about handing out carfare in the rain. Walking about in that
heavy animal stupor which comes with begging I got to thinking of Maxie the
window-trimmer and how the first time I spied him he was standing in the
show-window dressing a mannikin. And from that in a few minutes to
Dostoievski, then the world stopped dead, and then, like a great rose bush
opening in the night, his sister Rita’s warm, velvety flesh.