"‘Pleasure is a great guide to what you should be doing next,’ the critic Helen Vendler..."

“‘Pleasure is a great guide to what you should be doing next,’ the critic Helen Vendler has said. And, assuming you don’t get your jollies from eating McDonalds fries in bulk or torturing endangered animals, I think this is fantastic advice. Instead of focusing, preemptively, on the ways you might be failing as a writer, or becoming obsessed with outcomes, your vision of your novel’s cover art and ISBN and ectoplasmic blurb from the exhumed corpse of Gore Vidal, why not make it your goal… to take pleasure in the process itself? I can vouch for the efficacy of this approach.”

- Karen Russell

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