Writing What You Don't Know

I became a writer precisely because I wanted to make things up. To spin yarns. To lie my head off. And it isn’t memory that interests me most as a writer but rather invention. I became a writer so that I could use my imagination. — Sigrid Nunez

Greetings, writers—

In a lovely craft essay for The Sewanee Review, Sigrid Nunez (author of many books, including the National Book Award-winning The Friend and the sad, charming Mitz, an imagined biography of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s marmoset) makes the argument that when it comes to writing, imagination is more powerful than memory.