The Iowa Writers’ Workshop has long been one of the nation’s foremost graduate creative writing programs, with famous alumni like John Irving, Jane Smiley and T.C. Boyle. We Wanted to be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, edited by Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer, is a new collection of essays, thoughts and more on what the writing life was like inside—and outside—the famed program.

Read reviews of more famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop writers at Kirkus.

Here, some excerpts of writers’ takes from the book, out this week:

DOUG UNGER: It only makes sense to paraphrase Borges here. The exemplary lives of writers rarely make good examples for young writers because most of them, the vast majority of them, the successful writers, have gone through a long period where they’ve been marginalized, ignored, and they’ve had to persevere, before they achieve any success. By success, I mean in purely artistic terms, bringing your story or novel into that form in which it achieves what you as an artist want it to achieve.

By success, I mean in purely artistic terms, bringing your story or novel into that form in which it achieves what you as an artist want it to achieve. 

Publication is something that happens by a combination of the excellence of the work and luck, and some writers just don’t have the luck…or not right away. A writer can be writing at a fine level, but the culture won’t turn its head until a certain time.

Ray Carver was writing wonderful stories from 1959 on, but his breakthrough was two stories in Esquire in ’72 and ’73, I think, and his first mainstream collection came out in 1976, after seventeen years. But he just kept writing—poems and stories—writing when he could because he understood this to be his vocation, what he was supposed to do. 

JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS: Publishing is a process that is very separate from writing. It’s important not to publish too soon before the work is ready. And it’s important to see writing as independent of publishing.

Writing is the reason. Writing is the process through which writers make sense of the world; it’s the creation or apprehension of meaning through language. In that sense, it is our religion, our way in, our connection to consciousness, to elements of divinity within human lives.

JOE HALDEMAN: The details about starting a writing career are so different now—the markets, the mediums, the audiences, the editorial scene— that I’d hesitate to advise a young writer in terms of my own beginning career.

In general terms, I’d say to never accept that writing has to be a life of failure. Your successes tend to be internal, personal. But they have to be thrilling or you’re in the wrong line of work.

If you do triumph by some chance, and you do attain a measure of success in conventional terms, the obvious advice is still good: Don’t take yourself too seriously. Don’t be a son of a bitch with less successful writers. Don’t expect it to last. Love it while you have it, but don’t despise it when it leaves.

JACK LEGGETT: Of course the need for approval, some kind of approval, lurks out there. I don’t mean to rid myself of it since…I’m realistic. I mean I know the publishing business; I know it’s a disaster. Even young writers writing good books find it impossible to publish and that I, at ninety-one, would be a joke in the publishing office. Why are you publishing a ninetyone-year-old guy? He has no future. My old agent told me that. He said they don’t publish anybody over fifty now. So I know nobody, other than some crazed editor, who would say we’ve got to do this book. But, still, I think the possibility that that might happen…

Reprinted with permission of Skyhorse Publishing.