Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and
pupil are located in the same individual.


Thursday, November 19, 2009

Beginnings...

Empty blank white pages…waiting…expectant, for you the daunted writer to mar them with the black letters that you feel are ever so important.


Beginnings are hard. As it is with this blog, and the first post. But here I am, laying words down sentence after sentence, getting that oh so hard first post out of the way.


Let me start out by saying this -I am a distracted writer.




I start projects and then meander off course as daily routine and life. I can’t quit though. Writing is as necessary to me as eating. The un-finished novel I have stuffed in a drawer has a little piece of my soul in it and what sort of person would I be if I just left part of soul in a dirty drawer?


I want this blog to be a place where I can find the inspiration, motivation or plain old instruction to get myself going again. I want it to get me to my work sooner and with greater courage and confidence, but not to substitute for the process of writing itself…



You don’t need to be a writer or artist to struggle with goals that seem beyond your reach and a lack of appreciation from others- it’s just a little more pervasive in the art making world. Writing takes self motivation and can be a lonely and overwhelming undertaking. So that is why this is not just a personal journal, but a blog. Because your comments and input are important.




Not all writer’s went to creative writing workshops but they did have each other’s inspiration and critiques to feed off. Hemingway denigrated the idea of writing schools, but he had in Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound arguably the two best teaching editors in Western letters. Faulkner sought out Sherwood Anderson, Robert Lowell spent a summer with Allen Tate, and we have Famous Pairs: Coleridge and Wordsworth, Melville and Hawthorne, Eliot and Pound, Joyce and Beckett. So please, join me on this journey of inspiration and honing of our craft as writers.

It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.


-Virginia Woolf

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