Keep Going

Use what you have.

Insecurity

The man who jumped off cliffs, and flew.

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.

You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

You fail only if you stop writing. 

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)

Thank you for the wild rumpus.

R.I.P. Maurice Sendak

Small thoughts from #Muse2012

"I try to write a little bit every day."

This past weekend I attended the Grub Street Muse and the Marketplace writing conference.  I was delighted to catch up with old Grubbie friends, visiting professionals (some I'd spent time with earlier this year, some I hadn't seen in two years), and of course I took in some wonderful sessions covering both the craft of writing and the strategies of publishing.  Keynote speaker Julia Alvarez shared the above cartoon with us, as well as this quote...

She said she starts each day's work with the Mayan weaver’s prayer. She explained that Mayan weavers begin the day with whatever is on hand, whatever thread, whatever dye, and they know that each material may need to be handled differently in order for it to shine best within the final fabric, so there is no set design, nothing pre-planned about the arrangement of the weave when they sit down to the loom each day.  And so, before they begin work, they pray:

“Grant me the intelligence and the patience to find the true pattern.”

I'll share more from the Muse over the next several days, and may you find the true pattern of your writing when you next sit down to work.

Invocation for Beginnings

Define yourself for yourself.

Poetry. Just because.

Hidden Rose by Emily J. Photography

Sometimes hidden from me

in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware

as by the beating of my heart,

suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge

of the thicket, grace and light

where yesterday was only a shade,

and once more I am blessed, choosing

again what I chose before.

-- "The Wild Rose" by Wendell Berry

Permission to write: Thou Mayest

Image found at Archaeolibris

My good friend and ruthless crit partner Bernice Buresh just sent me an email from California that I feel compelled to share here:

We stopped at the John Steinbeck museum in Salinas... Glad we did. In one display, there was a carved wooden box and a copy of East of Eden. This is what the description said:

When Steinbeck was writing East of Eden, he began each day's work by writing a letter to his editor Pascal Covicí. He made a box with the Hebrew word Timshel carved on it. It means Thou Mayest. When Steinbeck finished the book he sent the manuscript in the box to Covicí.

This is how I interpret this. Steinbeck needed a daily check-in, so he created one. Steinbeck needed permission to do this project. Since the story was about Cain and Abel he found an old testament word that he could use as a talisman to give him permission.

Conclusion: Steinbeck needed the same things we do to do his work.

An excerpt from those letters to Steinbeck's editor (which filled a journal over the better part of 1951) confirms Bernice's hunch:

I must get into the book again at least try to even though my mind is badly cut up in all directions. Very hard to concentrate today. But I must try for my own safety.Take things in stride and particularly don't anticipate trouble before it happens. One of my very worst habits is the anticipation of difficulties and vicariously to go through them in advance. Then, if they do happen I have to do it twice, and if they don't happen I have done them unnecessarily. I know this is my habit... but not to do it requires constant watchfulness on my part. I have the recurring tendency. I guess I am what is called a worrier.

In my first blog post of the new year, blood on the page, I wrote that you don't need permission from ANYONE to write, and that in seeking permission, approval, or encouragement from outside sources, you may be giving away power you should keep for yourself. Great writers aren't immune to self-doubt, fear, or writerly obsessions -- I read somewhere that Hemingway's manuscripts were found with numbers written in the margins that turned out to be tallies of his daily word count -- but perhaps these writers were able to give themselves the permissions and structures they needed to defeat those doubts long enough to get the damn work done.

Timshel. Thou mayest. If you choose, go write. No one else can move those mountains for you.

How do you give yourself permission to write?

Write fast.

Write so fast, your inner editor can't catch you.

-- Carrie Kei Heim Binas

Thus ends the second-half-of-November inspirational-quote marathon. If you're still doing NaNoWriMo, WHAT ARE YOU DOING ONLINE?!?!!? GO WRITE!

Every minute you spend writing.

[My] first manuscript will never be published, but writing it was in NO way a waste of time. If you want to be a writer, every minute you spend writing is valuable . . . The world will never see the product, but the process was worth every second.

-- Alison Cherry

Daily inspirational quotes will be posted here through the rest of November. KEEP WRITING.

Courage.

Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage.

-- Anaïs Nin

Daily inspirational quotes will be posted here through the rest of November. KEEP WRITING.

Persistence.

How often -- even before we began -- have we declared a task "impossible"? And how often have we construed a picture of ourselves as being inadequate? . . . A great deal depends upon the thought patterns we choose and on the persistence with which we affirm them.

-- Piero Ferrucci

Daily inspirational quotes will be posted here through the rest of November. KEEP WRITING.

The same age.

Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.

When I make this point in teaching, I am met by instant defensive hostility: "But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano / act / paint / write a decent play?"

Yes . . . the same age you will be if you don't.

So let's start.

-- Julia Cameron

Daily inspirational quotes will be posted here through the rest of November. KEEP WRITING.

The energy it takes to pout.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

-- Duke Ellington

Daily inspirational quotes will be posted here through the rest of November. KEEP WRITING.

Dare.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.

-- Seneca (4 B.C. - 65 A.D.)

Daily inspirational quotes will be posted here through the rest of November. KEEP WRITING.

Lose your fear.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

-- Joseph Chilton Pearce

Daily inspirational quotes will be posted here through the rest of November. KEEP WRITING.

Trust your subconscious.

... I discovered that if I trusted my subconscious, or imagination, whatever you want to call it, and if I made the characters as real and honest as I could, then no matter how complex the pattern being woven, my subconscious would find ways to tie it together -- often doing things far more complicated and sophisticated than I could with brute conscious effort. I would have ideas for 'nodes', as I think of them -- story or character details that have lots of potential connections to other such nodes -- and even though I didn't quite understand, I would plunk them in. Two hundred pages later, everything would back-fit, and I'd say, "Ah, that's why I wrote that."

-- Tad Williams

Daily inspirational quotes will be posted here through the rest of November. KEEP WRITING.

The seat of your pants.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

-- Mary Heaton Vorse

Daily inspirational quotes will be posted here through the rest of November. KEEP WRITING.