I'd read this many years ago and enjoyed it, and I liked it even more this time. It's simpler, more insightful and inspiring than many recently-written books on writing. I hope I can make myself follow the routine-building assignments she describes.

Here are a few of the passages I highlighted:

These two strange and arbitrary performances — early morning writing, and writing by prearrangement — should be kept up till you write fluently at will.

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Those who are sensitive enough to want ardently to become writers are usually a little too suggestible for their own good. Consciously or not, they may have fallen into the temptation of imitating an established author. It may be a genuine master of writing; it may be (and too often is) the author whose work is having the greatest vogue at the moment.

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The best way to escape the temptation to imitate is to discover as early as possible one's own tastes and excellences.

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The repetitions, the recurrent ideas, the frequent prose forms in these pages will give you your clues. They will show you where your native gift lies, whether or not you eventually decide to specialize in it.

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In my experience, the pupil who sets down the night's dream or recasts the day before into ideal form, who takes the morning hour to write a complete anecdote or passage of sharp dialogue, is likely to be the short story writer in embryo. Certain types of character sketching, when it is brief and concerned with rather general (or even obvious) traits, point the same way. A subtler analysis of characters, a consideration of motives, acute self- examination (as distinct from romanticizing one's actions), the contrasting of different characters faced by the same dilemma, most often indicate the novelist. A kind of musing introspection or of speculation only sketched in is found in the essay writer's notebook, and with the particularizing of an abstract speculation by assigning the various elements of the problem to characters who act out the idea, there is the promise of the more meditative type of novelist.

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I think that holding up the work of each pupil in class for the criticism of the others is a thoroughly pernicious practice, and it does not become harmless simply by allowing the manuscript to be read without assigning its authorship publicly.

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I recommend an almost inhuman taciturnity to my students, at least about work that is being done at the moment.

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It is well to understand as early as possible in one's writing life that there is just one contribution which every one of us can make: we can give into the common pool of experience some comprehension of the world as it looks to each of us. There is one sense in which everyone is unique. No one else was born of your parents, at just that time of just that country's history; no one underwent just your experiences, reached just your conclusions, or faces the world with the exact set of ideas that you must have. If you can come to such friendly terms with yourself that you are able and willing to say precisely what you think of any given situation or character, if you can tell a story as it can appear only to you of all the people on earth, you will inevitably have a piece of work which is original.

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No human being is so poor as to have no trace of genius; none so great that he comes within infinity of using his own inheritance to the full.