Donald Murray

1.) As Murray says, being a writer is the process where you tell yourself the story of your life, and see you life in writerly ways such as: recording images, fragments of conversations, observation of what is and what should be, making connections, making story from chaos. Being a writer means you are, in a way, re-visiting and re-creating the scenes of your life by writing them down on paper.

2.) "Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind him" (Catherine Drinker Bowen).

I feel that this quote really explains what writing actually is. When we write, we pull a little bit of ourselves into the story. Whether it be memories of our lives or characteristics of ourselves or somebody we know, a little bit of ourselves is often seen in the stories we write. Often, the writer may re-live events through the process of writing it down, therefore experiencing it twice, as the quote explains.