Ralph Fletcher Quotes

Here's the secret of writing: there is no secret.

You don't learn to write by going through a series of preset writing exercises. You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you.

When someone you love dies, you get a big bowl of sadness put down in front of you, steaming hot. You can start eating now, or you can let it cool and eat it bit by bit later one. Either way, you end up eating the whole thing. There's really no way around it.

At night these people put out food so the ghosts will have something to eat. They put out Vietnamese food for the ghosts of the dead Vietnamese soldiers. But many American GIs died, too, so they put out American food for the ghosts of the dead American soldiers.

The real meaning of a poem is to stop time.

Poems are the 'daredevil' of writing
because a poem will say what nobody else wants to say.

Writing becomes beautiful when it becomes specific, concrete.

Use your notebook to breathe in the world around you.

If you want to write poetry, you must have poems that deeply move you. Poems you can't live without. I think of a poem as the blood in a blood transfusion, given from the heart of the poet to the heart of the reader. Seek after poems that live inside you, poems that move through your veins.

Springtime
and I wish I knew you

When students write from experience, they can breathe those specifics into their writing- dialect, odd smells, precise names of plants- that can animate even the most tired and tedious text.

Good writing happens when human beings follow particular steps to take control of their sentences-to make their words do what they want them to do.

It's misleading to think of writers as special creatures, word sorcerers who possess some sort of magical knowledge hidden from everyone else. Writers are ordinary people who like to write. They feel the urge to write, and they scratch that itch every chance they get.