6 ideas
The vocation is indifferent to the writer's suffering and cannot be used as therapy or refuge. Whoever tries to write in order to soothe their own pain produces bad work, because the craft demands attention to the thing being made, not relief for the one making it.
Every emotional state carries its own characteristic distortion. Happiness makes the imagination loose, fanciful, and careless, while grief pulls the writer toward self-pity and sentimentality. The discipline is to recognize which pull you are under and write against it.
When her children were small she found she could barely write, felt the vocation slipping away, and resented the demands on her attention. Over time the absorbing, concrete care of children became material and taught her closer attention to real, ordinary things, so the apparent loss later enlarged her writing.
As a young writer she looked at people with detached, mocking malice, treating characters as specimens to expose. Real suffering taught her to write with tenderness toward them. The remaining danger is that compassion curdles into sentimentality unless the old clear-eyed distance is kept alongside it.
Writing to order, for a moral purpose, or in a borrowed manner fails, because the work goes dead when it does not come from the writer's own experience and voice. Imitating admired authors or inventing feelings one does not have produces falseness the reader can detect.
Early on she deliberately wrote in a hard, unsentimental, 'masculine' manner, because she feared being dismissed as a gushing woman writer. Only later did she accept that her own feminine perspective and domestic material were legitimate sources rather than weaknesses to be hidden.