Missing past issues of the JDM Letter? You can find them all right here. Each issue features (1) a quote from a well-known writer, (2) some thoughts on what that quote means, and (3) a brief biographical profile of that writer. To download: Option-click (Mac) or right-click (PC) on the month of the issue you want.
2024
DECEMBER: Octavia E. Butler
“Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable.”
NOVEMBER: Gene Wolfe
“You never learn how to write a novel. You only learn how to write the novel you’re on.”
OCTOBER: Maya Angelou
“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
SEPTEMBER: E.L. Doctorow
“Planning to write is not writing. Writing is writing.”
AUGUST: William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White
“Omit needless words.”
JULY: Kurt Vonnegut
“Practice any art … to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.”
JUNE: Kate Atkinson
“To be honest if I write one good sentence in a day that’s a success for me.”
MAY: Raymond Chandler
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.”
APR: James Baldwin
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
MAR: Lou Berney
“There are times when it’s best to really think your way through it, and there are times when it’s best that you don’t know where you’re going.”
FEB: George Orwell
“The rough draft is always a ghastly mess bearing little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of the job.”
JAN: Anne Lamott
“Good writing is about telling the truth.”
2023
DEC: Robertson Davies
“The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.”
NOV: Thomas Mann
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
OCT: Leslie Marmon Silko
“Stories are all we have to fight off illness and death.”
SEP: Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
“Murder your darlings.”
AUG: Jim Thompson
“There is only one plot—things are not as they seem.”
JUL: Samuel Langhorne Clemens (aka Mark Twain)
“Yesterday Mr. Hall wrote that the printer’s proof-reader was improving my punctuation for me, and I telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray.”
JUN: Madeleine L’Engle
“I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.”
MAY: Rachel Carson
“The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.”
Apr: (no letter that month)
MAR: James Patterson
“If Sue ever leaves me, I’m going with her.”
FEB: Joan Didion
“I write to find out what I think.”
JAN: Jack London
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
