The only way to learn is from experience, and everyone has to experience something to learn not to do it. As creative people, we will make mistakes, and plenty of them. The only way not to be afraid of those mistakes is to forgive them in yourself and everyone.
The page is blank. You may be writing about the world you’ve experienced, but the meaning you find for your stories always starts in you – nowhere else.
Artists can start believing too much in struggle and in what they find difficult. However, what comes most easily to us is usually the expression of our natural genius, where our interest wants to go.
Writing requires inspired ideas. But we can’t demand them, can’t use our craft to manufacture them. But we can practice putting ourselves into the frame of mind that allows and invites them.
As Richard Bach pointed out: writers aren’t looking for an editor or a publisher, but a member of their intellectual family. They’re out there, but you have to believe they exist to find them.
We need our readers to fill in what we leave out; it’s what really finishes a story. This means we have to trust them, even though sometimes they don’t make the connections we hope.
As Beethoven no doubt knew – there’s nothing better than joy, and creativity teaches us again and again it’s always inside of us, never outside of us.
The time I learned why being an author is so valuable, and how we can use this authority to allow people to believe the stories they actually want to believe.
A true story about how physical pain and suffering taught me a lot about all suffering. If I’m honest, most of it wasn’t real, wasn’t necessary.
If you’re like me, you prefer to be alone while you write. But you’re also never lonely, at least not when it’s going well. That’s because loneliness is feeling disconnected from that to which you always want connection. Writing is one way to practice that connection.
Just like you can’t know every sentence in a paragraph before you write it, so too you can’t know how your career or life will unfold. As creative people, we must be more interested in what interests us most, and less on how we will sell it, publish it, or monetize it.
Sometimes editing is hard because all those passages we reread and don’t like remind us of the parts of our life that seem to have happened to us but we know on some level we created ourselves. Writing is a chance to practice making choices on purpose, to choose what we actually want, to always be the author of our lives.
Every story has three arcs: The Physical, The Emotional, and The Intentional. The last is the most important – why you’re telling the story, the gift you’re giving the reader. Until you know it, you don’t know what the story is really about.
It’s easy for writers to put all their attention on results – the finished book, the contract, the sales – and start believing that the experience of writing, what we’re actually doing, doesn’t really matter. Not only does your experience matter, it’s the only thing that matters.
Writing can be like a performance since we never really know what’s going to happen when sit down at the desk. We must trust we’ll know what to write when our attention meets the story, when we’re actually present with our creative desire.
It’s not for the money, though that’s always nice. And it’s not for the recognition or praise. No, it’s always so we can receive what we want to give. That’s the real creative transaction we all crave.
This one of the most common hard parts for writers is taking that messy first draft and turning into something we’d actually like to share with others. The key is asking the right questions while we rewrite, the ones that keep us in the seat of our creativity.
The big successes – the completed book, the published novel, the good sales – are always an accumulation of little successes. Yet writers often don’t appreciate those small successes because they don’t think they really count until the big ones have been met.
Sometimes writers feel like beggars asking for handouts as they submit their work. But we’re not. We’re not asking for anything, we’re giving something. We just need to remember the value of what it is we’re offering.
Whether you use this language or not, you know what it feels like when you get out of your own way. But how do we do that? The key is getting curious, asking questions in which we’re sincerely interested, and then accepting any answer that comes.