writing-process

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn__.

We write our personal story as intermittent authors; the narrator is always searching for a unitive point of view. We strive to perceive oneself from a unified perspective, but it is virtually impossible to do so. Human perception of the self is an illusion. We constantly sift through shifting memories. We experience the present under the fragrance cast by the past and under the illusionary aura of the future.

Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.

...if you always move in certainty, your writing will be flat - creativity is a rugged terrain...

I am a creator, writing like the wind, I carry the weight of a future world in the barrel of a pen, etching my characters into the paper with life giving ink so my dreams and reality might finally meet.

Split your skull__ hatchet works well enough. Take a more delicate instrument__ scalpel, perhaps__nd make a hand-sized slit; it doesn__ matter where. Reach in (no glove needed), plunge down to the very bottom, pinch the inside layer of membrane and yank, hard. If it feels like you__e just turned your brain inside out, you have. Writing is brain surgery, pure and simple.

The art of writing is not as solitary as one might think. When it finally dawns on us one day that our task as writers is to share what we know of the human spirit, we suddenly discover that we were never truly alone.

I suck the words word-dryto me, assimilated orderly at breakeye speedstill hard and hardersofter thenline-lined book-dry__il not a dropof water-bloodfrom oak and elmand authored menis left to whisper__ead_

I__e had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.

When I pour a bowl of Uncle Sam__ cereal, I never know if I should stand when I eat, salute it first, or simply hum the Star Spangled Banner between mouthfuls.

This piece of earth I billet grows small. Bullets of time dart past, dropping shards of opportunity at my feet. And until the rift that surrounds my decaying body clamps shut__wallows me up like so many remains__ army on, simultaneously ignoring and saving my comrades in the hole.Such is a writer__ life.

Pencil. Paper. Forget the world.

Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things__ike composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me that the moon behind a certain cloud formation looked very like a painkiller dissolving in a glass of water. I didn__ work toward that simile, it was simply there: I was mugged, as it were, by the similarity between these two very different things. Literary composition can be a similar process. The writer__ real world and the writer__ fictional world are compared, and these comparisons turned into text. But other times literary composition can be a plain old slog, and nothing to do with zones or inspiration. It__ world making and the peopling of those worlds, complete with time lines and heartache.

The sooner you finish procrastinating, the sooner you can get back to your art.

With poetry and writing, the question isn__ __o you know the right words?_.The real question is, __an you make words from the unwordable, chisel blocks of raw silence into shapes and touch our souls?

Nothing listens as well as a blank page.

We can create transcending stories for readers and for us. Creativity is a double edge sword, which can kill the writer.

There's still too much energy leftover at this tomb-desk, on Broadway, when I am semi-asleep at night in our bedroom, struggling to get a good night's rest. There's an overflow of loin energy. It spills out from my pores as if I were a cracked drum of reacting chemicals. I need to work to expend this excess energy in words, stories and books....My mind is a body that's a mind.