How does creation happen?
The story itself—the emergent life inside the inspiration—is a dynamic participant in the creative process.
writing
Attending the Lotus
Each and every one of us ordinary people has the capacity to create beauty.
The Journal: The Writer’s Compost
The journal is a writer’s compost bin. It’s tucked out back, behind the fence or along the alley where the smell won’t waft into the kitchen and the fruit flies won’t irritate the gardeners. You add to it daily, or at least whenever you’ve got a heaping bucket of scraps (read: baggage) to unload.
Writing as Listening
Writing, I suspect, is one way we can inhabit that liminal space right before prayer becomes prayer.
Seeing Again—and Again, and Again…
When we see something anew, we come to respect it. Each new perspective, each layer of understanding, deepens our regard. Seen in this light, revision is the most respectful approach to our writing—and to much else in our days.
Goodness Gracious
All creative work is becoming; it is more alive or less alive, and our job as artists is to nurture life.
Liberating Stories
We jam our experiences into a box and come to love that box, but the work of writing—the work of evolving—requires unpacking the box and building a new one, perhaps a bit more fitting, and then discovering a cloth bag works better, and finally realizing that all these containers are marvelous but incapable of holding the true glory which is our story.
Play with Me!
Without carving space between and within our necessary activities to engage the world spontaneously, for its own sake, there’s no life-spark. Play is how we come spiritually alive.
Enduring the Discomfort of Writing
A writer’s capacity to tolerate discomfort, along with violent busts of elation and anguish, determines how deeply and for how long he or she can reside in the generative state.
Writing as Deep Listening
Every story has a hidden life—a soul, if you will. How writers tend this soul significantly affects our work and our well-being. This tending is really active listening. It’s both willful, sprung from the self, and responsive, heeding that life-force beyond the story and its readership.