Melissa Febos Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• I saved letters from my boss. There are things in there that are directly transcribed. I was so glad I did that. Sometimes when I was writing the book I wondered if some little writer hobbit part of my brain was back there puppeteering that action. But it really never, on any conscious level, occurred to me that I would write about it. I will say, I thought probably some day there would be an ancillary character in some novel - not in the one I was currently writing - that would be a dominatrix or something.

  Melissa Febos

  Book, Writing, Character

  Source: therumpus.net

• I absolutely think that women told that writing about themselves is somehow not worthy enough for a public audience all the time. I hear it so often from my students and friends. As if it doesn't take rigorous craft, and intellectual acuity to write a slammin' book of any kind. But perhaps, especially, about the body.

  Melissa Febos

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• Me writing the book and the subsequent interactions that we had were actually the cap on that experience. We were still in this weird purgatory about it when I published the book. When I gave them the galleys and what ensued after that, then I understood a lot more about our relationships and what the experience meant to them. I'd never wanted to know what they thought about it at all.

  Melissa Febos

  Book, Writing, Our Relationship

  Source: therumpus.net

• I can only see right in front of me when I'm writing, you know? I never think of it as raw or personal or anything but where I'm at in the moment. But I can see it sort of after I finish.

  Melissa Febos

  Writing, Thinking, Moments

  Source: therumpus.net

• Even though novels were the love of my life, I started off writing poetry. I think because I had a knack for image and lyricism, even though I didn't really have anything to write about, or I didn't know what to write about. I could just couple words together that pleased me and so poetry seemed sort of natural.

  Melissa Febos

  Couple, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• I didn't know enough as a writer to understand why I needed to do this, but I understood in a very gut way that I could not entertain those thoughts of pleasing people and write this book - that it would be a very different book. Without really sort of investigating that instinct, which I'm glad for, I just made a conscious decision to put blinders on and not think about anything and put it all in. And I did. I put everything in. I had to look at the whole picture to see what I needed.

  Melissa Febos

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• I always listen to music when I write! I basically make a playlist for every essay; sometimes it's just one song, or three songs, over and over and over. I sort of find the emotional pitch of the piece, and then match music to it, and then the music becomes a shortcut to the feeling, so I can enter it and work anywhere: on planes, cafes, at work, the train.

  Melissa Febos

  Song, Writing, Emotional

  Source: therumpus.net

• When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, "Novels," and she said, "You should be writing them then." Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen.

  Melissa Febos

  Smart, Writing, College

  Source: therumpus.net

• I couldn't have articulated this process at the time; I just sort of did it instinctually. But now when I talk about this with my students all the time, it's one of the first things I address in memoir classes - that you have to put it all in because you're writing your way into the ending of your own story. Even if you think you know what the story is, you don't until you write it. If you start leaving things out you could leave out vital organs and not know it.

  Melissa Febos

  Writing, Thinking, Class

  Source: therumpus.net

• I more seriously considered publishing it under a pseudonym than I considered publishing it as fiction. I think the decision to write it as nonfiction happened at the very outset of the process, because the overwhelming impetus for writing this book was to understand what the experience meant, and to override my own reductions and rationalizations, whatever story I had that was not true. It didn't sit well with me and I needed to answer that. That's sort of the reason I write everything.

  Melissa Febos

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• I made a conscious decision when I was writing that book to depict in real time how I treated it, and how I thought about it, and how I portrayed it to other people, because I wanted the story to be one of change from that to a more honest appraisal, a more accepting appraisal of myself and other people in that world.

  Melissa Febos

  Real, Book, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• The other reason I didn't want to fictionalize it is because one of the main points of publishing a memoir in nonfiction was that I wanted to write about what had been a very lonely experience. The books that most saved my life as a kid were the ones that articulated lonely experiences that I had thought were mine alone.

  Melissa Febos

  Lonely, Book, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• A lot of the experiences I write about could be described as grasping for boundaries, trying to find the limits of things.

  Melissa Febos

  Writing, Trying, Limits

  Source: therumpus.net

• I'm always writing to a younger version of myself, or a young woman who is like I was. I want that girl to know that I really existed and that it all went down that way.

  Melissa Febos

  Girl, Writing, Want

  Source: therumpus.net

• You don't have to write like David Foster Wallace or James Baldwin or Maggie Nelson - indeed, you shouldn't. Those writers are doing it better than you ever could.

  Melissa Febos

  Writing, Maggie, Nelson

  Source: therumpus.net

• I was in the fantasy. I was selling myself on the fantasy as I was doing it. It never occurred to me. I did take notes, but just because I am a writer. I've been a writer since I was five. You don't have any sort of outlandish, shocking, extraordinary, horrifying experience without writing it down, because I know and knew that you forget things. No matter how outrageous and amazing and extraordinary and seemingly unforgettable an experience is, it's kind of like a dream. It will erode inevitably, for me.

  Melissa Febos

  Dream, Writing, Erode

  Source: therumpus.net

• Early in my career as a domme, I both admired and feared becoming one of those career dommes. I saw, in myself, and in some other women in that industry, the way that sex work could eclipse the other parts of your personality, the way that I started to feel as if I wasn't qualified to do anything else. I had always known that I wanted to be a writer, and I stopped writing for a time while I was domming; the experience subsumed my other interests, and it scared me. Now, however, I have nothing but admiration for them.

  Melissa Febos

  Sex, Writing, Becoming One

  Interview With Rebecca Keith, therumpus.net. April 2, 2010.

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