|
|
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.
Jack Kerouac
Natural talent and all the breaks in the world notwithstanding, to become good at anything you've got to do the drills.
"You have to sing every day so you can build up to being, you know, Amazingly Brilliant."
~ Mick Jagger
Smell is the one sense that can evoke complete memories...
No one is more qualified than you are to write what you want to write.
A sunrise can be as faded as the dying roses on the far edge of the garden, or as lively and fresh as the pink skin of a baby.
Until you name yourself Writer, you will never be a writer.
Make a place for your writing, a sacred place...
How to get started writing? Write.
|
|
|
|
|
It is not for the destination we get aboard the soul train of writing. It is for the journey. The journey of self-discovery, of exploring the hinterlands of our imagination, of working loose the knots in our psychic shoelaces, of finding our voices and telling our stories. Of making our own loud noise.
Great though it may be to publish, publishing is not the purpose of writing. In the end, being published will not change your life, but writing will. If you are to be a writer who writes, you will never be finished. Stories may pass beneath your pen, or essays, poems, plays, books, fiction or non-fiction. Don't worry that you'll run out of ideas or subjects. You won't. Always, always there will be something more to write.
Athletes, dancers, CEOs, carpenters, waitresses -- hundreds of "occupations" end at some time in a person's life. But not writing. Writers are like the Ever Ready Bunny. We just keep going. A week before she died at 95, Edith Hamilton said, "You know I haven't felt up to writing, but now I think I am going to be able to finish that book on Plato."
Another thing to know about writing as journey is that there are no maps to show the way. We may read about the journey another writer has taken, but we can't follow in his or her footsteps. We have to whack through our own thickets and gather our own firewood.
Think of this: No one is more qualified than you are to write what you want to write. You're the only one who has ever lived your life. No one else can ever tell the stories you can tell. "Everyone is talented, original and has something important to say," Brenda Ueland told us in the first chapter of her book, IF YOU WANT TO WRITE (Graywolf Press).
No one else can tell you what to write either. No editors, or agents, or publishers or teachers or friends or lovers. Sometimes not even your thinking, rational mind can tell you where you're going on this writing journey. "Ah, Paris in the spring," it may say, but you find yourself in Fargo in February and a blizzard's blowing in. Why Fargo? Why February? Who can say? I never thought I'd write a novel set at Lake of the Ozarks in the mid-fifties. But here I am. At a fishing camp with a mother and her three daughters. And she doesn't even like to fish. Neither do I.
How brave we are to sign on for the journey. To trust the direction we receive from our inner guide and follow the road before us even though we can't see where it's taking us, can't, in fact, even see around the bend.
But here we are, like Louis and Clark. Canoes packed. Journals in hand. Setting out for the far and distant shore. Following some inner calling that urges us to leave behind the known and journey to what lies beyond.
Bon voyage.
|
|
|
|
