I started to write as a child as soon as I could read, or even before, when my mother read me Beatrix Potter at bedtime. Writing seemed to me to be the only sensible way to live and be happy.
Interpretation
Writing offers a path to happiness and fulfillment stemming from early inspirations.
In this quote, Jane Gardam reflects on her childhood experience with stories read by her mother, which ignited her passion for writing. She conveys that writing became her chosen way to express herself and find joy, suggesting that creative pursuits rooted in early influences can profoundly shape one's happiness and life choices.
In practice
Using this quote to inspire students in a creative writing class.
Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.
I discovered that writing was very nice indeed when I was very young, and I never changed. I don't think my style has changed very much at all - though I hope what I say is a bit more interesting. It's about getting to know a character and loving them, I think.
I was nearly 40 when I started. I had no fear that I wasn't going to write. I knew it was just delayed. Then, my goodness, I never stopped.
In modern novels, there is no one I want to copy. My style 'is a poor thing, but it is my own.'
At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.
If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.
You see a child play, and it is so close to seeing an artist paint, for in play a child says things without uttering a word. You can see how he solves his problems. You can also see what's wrong. Young children, especially, have enormous creativity, and whatever's in them rises to the surface in free play.
If you want to find out what a writer or a cartoonist really feels, look at his work. That's enough.
In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.
Poetry is that / which arrives at the intellect / by way of the heart.
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