Tag: inspiration
The Unnoticed Writer
Over the last couple of days there’s been fair amount of buzz around the fiction writer Edith Pearlman. Her “break-out” story collection, Honeydew, is forthcoming from Little, Brown & Company. Pearlman is 78, and has published a number of story collections with small presses. In 2011, her collection Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories earned […]
We Can Not Be Defeated
There are writers who are joyful when they write. I have moments like that, sure, but in general I am terrified. I am more plotter than pantser, but there are things, usually the most integral, that are beyond preparation. I believe that you have to prove yourself, you have to earn it, before the story […]
What I Learned from my Writing Retreat
Facing my empty nest and a ticking clock, I finally decided to plunge into the writing life. Writing more seemed too obvious so I searched for conferences or classes. I came across a “retreat” offered by the author of a bestselling memoir I’d recently read. Though I hadn’t done anything like this before, I was […]
Which Writing Self is me?
Do you know what’s propelling you forward and what’s holding you back in your writing and in your life? I do, thanks to a self awareness exercise** I do periodically. It’s helped me realise why it’s taken me over a year (and counting) to write the dreaded second novel while the first only took about […]
Art From the Heart – Getting Out of the Way of Your Own Writing
There is a persistent idea in the West of the artist (not just we writers but artists of all types) as tortured creatures, pulling art out of ourselves in the way hara-kiri warriors once ripped out their own entrails. The unbearable weight of dragging art out in this way inevitably takes its toll and thus […]
Coming Back to Writing
When I was a little girl I made a choice. At least I thought I did. I was nine years old. Mousey and a bit serious. I only cared about two things – reading teenage horror novels and Westlife. My Aunt was allaying herself of some furniture – she had a beautiful house – and […]
How Writing and Gardening Overlaps
“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” -Margaret Atwood This spring, when the first grape hyacinths were pushing their way through the snow, I made a decision to abandon something I love for something I love even more. Although I grew up in a family of avid gardeners, […]
Mighty Forces
The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will and the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why. – Albert Einstein. We’ve all experienced magic when writing. Writers speak of the process and the product as: […]
Do You Have to Suffer to Write?
Famous authors are often distinguished by horrific childhoods, intensive suffering, depression or desperation. Think Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolff. Memoirists notably mine their traumas like gold, exorcising demons along the way. Of course, conflict is the core of storytelling, and emotional conflicts are fiction’s treasure, but do you have to be miserable to write great fiction? Novelists […]
Airports – the Writer’s Friend
Airport (noun): a place where people reveal hidden things about themselves. That’s not what is says in the dictionary – but perhaps it should be… Everyone hates airports. Right? They are busy, crowded places where almost everyone is under stress, in a hurry or tired and cranky. People snap at each other and at airline […]
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