Anna Quindlen comes to Manhasset for LI Litfest event

Anyone can write, Anna Quindlen insists, and everyone should.

In her heartfelt new book “Write for Your Life” (Random House, $26), the bestselling author offers inspiring examples to support her argument that by writing down their thoughts, feelings, and everyday experiences, people leave a vital record for their loved ones and for history.

Quindlen spoke via Zoom shortly ahead of her April 13 appearance at the Manhasset Cinemas for a Long Island LitFest event. Doing book events on Long Island is always special, she says, partly because it’s a chance to catch up with the many authors who live there: “It’s the writers’ roundelay — ‘Hey, Susan Isaacs! Hey Ina Garten! Good to see you!’ ”

What prompted you to write this book urging people to write about their lives?

A hundred years ago, everybody wrote. People wrote voluminous letters, and because it was the only way to communicate with other people, they kept journals and diaries. Sometime between then and now, we professionalized writing, so that when someone tells me a terrific story and I say, “You should write that down,” the immediate response is, “I’m not a writer.” But everybody who’s literate can be a writer, as long as you don’t put that place of 'No' between you and sitting down to put words on paper.

I’d been thinking about this for a long time and then was surprised and pleased to discover that writing had taken a decided upturn during the pandemic; stationery stores were selling out journals, notecards, stationery at record levels. It was one of those times when you’re working on a story and then suddenly you hit this one fact that says to you, “Yes! I am right about this!”

Why do you think many people today find writing so intimidating?

We’ve somehow gotten into this mindset that if you are good at something, that means it must be easy. Students who find writing difficult assume they are not writers. Well, I find writing pretty excruciating every day, and this is, I think, book 21! There is no chasm between difficult and getting it done; there’s just a conversation you have to have with yourself. I always have to give myself a psychic talking-to, and anyone doing this, including people who don’t write for a living, has to do it, too.

Why is it important for people who are not professional writers to set down their experiences?

When people hang back and say, “I’m not a writer,” and don’t tell their stories, then we miss a part of our national history that needs to be told. I have some excerpts in the last chapter from a book called ‘Pioneer Women,’ accounts by women who settled the state of Kansas about what it had been like. Those stories are almost novelistic, or something you would see in a movie — plagues of grasshoppers, living for years in a dugout house carved in the earth —  except it was the real lives of these people. That book is so powerful, and I am so grateful that someone took the initiative to have these women write down their stories.

Do you see a distinction between writing on paper and writing online?

There’s a distance that the computer and the Internet create that makes it seem as though it doesn’t count in the same way. I wonder if cyberbullies would act differently if they had to write down what they said on a piece of paper and hand-deliver it to another person. Words on paper have an intimacy that most of what we do online does not. Because you have to take the time to put the words together, you stop and look at it and process it differently than if it was just running around in your mind.

Sometimes you write down a sentence and think, “Is that really what I think? Is that really how I feel?” Something about seeing it on the page makes you interrogate it in a different way, and I can’t help but think that helps you.