writing-process

Book:Sharing of life and experiences with other people.This is lifetime notes for all generations.

So what do you do when you are stuck?The first thing I do when I am stuck is pray. But I__ not talking about a quick, Help me Lord, Sunday__ a comin_ prayer. When I get stuck I get up from my desk to head for my closet. Literally. If I__ at the office I go over to a corner that I have deemed my closet away from home. I get on my knees and remind God that this was not my idea, it was His_None of this is new information to God_Then I ask God to show me if there is something He wants to say to prepare me for what He wants me to communicate to our congregation. I surrender my ideas, my outline and my topic. Then I just stay in that quiet place until God quiets my heart_Many times I will have a breakthrough thought or idea that brings clarity to my message. . .Like you, I am simply a mouthpiece. Getting stuck is one way God keeps me ever conscious of that fact.

I'll never amount to anything__ell anything my parents want, so instead I__l end up puking and drinking till I__ blind drunk, It__ funny my mother says I hurt myself to spite her but she doesn__ know I hurt myself because I am, I am, I am a writer.

Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.

The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought--while his hand moved rapidly--what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have not discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words.

I know now that the poem in my head, the one that pushed me to the page, begged me - or dared me to be born is almost never the poem that comes out. I suppose it__ like anything born of/with free will and the will to live: once I__e given the seed, once the juices flow through any sort of birth canal and make it to the ambient air there will, at that point, be forces that come into play that are no longer entirely mine. To forget that each word is a life unto itself is to strangle it dead before it can even take a step.

words are a border collie__ worst nightmare.

Distraction is reading written word and when I seek to make distraction I write the words I wish to be enveloped in.

Words are not cubicles for truth telling. Words do not allow us to touch the face of God or define the contours of the soul. Words are imprecise and cannot capture all aspects of reality or replicate all facets of a person__ emotional mélange. Language allows for limited explorations of reality and minimal probing of the human mind. I accept that the only possible relation between language and the world is the image displayed in each person__ head by the picture invoking ability of language. Select word pictures might accurately portray what I perceive and still be vague, blatantly inaccurate, completely meaningless, misleading, distorted, or incomprehensible in other persons_ minds.

And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander.

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne's vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn't care about masterpieces, or even good paintings... but about what is beyond all painting, all art.

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn't sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality.

But whatever the exact psychology of the process {receiving recognition or literary success}, the present has a way of contaminating the past. And the writing will change accordingly. Turmoil and dilemma once experienced with a certain desperation may be seen more complacently as the writer reflects that through expressing them he has realized his inevitable and well-deserved triumph. The lean years of patient toil when no one paid attention may even begin to seem preferable to the present. The very thing you created in the heat of fierce concentration has destroyed the circumstances that made it possible. The writer is devoured along with his books.

Whenever I encounter writer__ block, I stop writing _ with my hands; and I then start writing with my legs.

It__ easy to write a sentence, paragraph, or book. What__ difficult is writing the best sentence, paragraph, or book, you can write.

The artistic creation of the poet, painter, photographer, and writer is a reflection of the artist__ inner world. The agenda of consciousness that spurs all forms of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but to portray its inward significance to the creator. A great poem, painting, photograph, and written composition fully express what the creator feels, in the deepest sense, about the distinctively depicted image that captured their imagination.