[Sharon] Olds still writes by hand, in cheap spiral-bound notebooks. When she’s really humming, she can fill a whole notebook in just a few days. Only a small fraction of this private writing will ever be published. Publication, for Olds, is not entirely the point. The act of writing itself, she insists, is fun — a physical discipline that sits somewhere between drawing and dancing. Olds writes searchingly, as a way to think and feel herself through the world. In her apartment, she told me that she had written, just that morning, a poem partly inspired by her feelings about our upcoming conversation. “Clouds of meaning were rolling this way and that,” she said.
When Olds finishes a notebook, she gets very organized. (“I’m kind of a fussbudget,” she says.) She records its start and end dates. She creates an index. She reads the material over and over, dog-earing pages. In this way, she builds up a huge archive of thinking and feeling; although her finished books tend to be slim, they carry inside them, hidden like dark matter, the gravity of all the unpublished writing that helped make them possible.
—Sam Anderson
—from Sex, Death, Family: Sharon Olds Is Still Shockingly Intimate [archive]
I don’t write seriously anymore, but I lovingly, longingly remember the feelings of the first paragraph, and wish I had (once) had the discipline of the second.