The Writing Life
To find Luke Sullivan’s Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: The Classic Guide to Creating Great Ads alongside my copies of Richard Hugo’s The Traveling Town, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction, and a few notable others is a testament to how good I think Sullivan’s book is. I know it’s a biased statement, but I don’t know what else to say. I like his book. I would read it again and again, and I intend to do so.
Some days, you need to rest. You have to call a time out. You don’t write. You don’t read. You don’t draw. You don’t listen to music unless music is something that helps you rest. You don’t watch movies. You’re quiet. You crawl beneath the covers or a blanket and sleep. You need to feel human again. You need to feel like yourself again, and the only way you know to do that is to take a break from everything and give yourself the rest you desperately need.
If I were to ask Ernest Hemingway how to write a book, I believe he’d scoff and say something about letting the words bleed onto the page. I’m no Hemingway, but I can understand his mindset: there is no right or wrong way to write a book. There is just the process of getting the words onto the page.
The usual saying when it comes to fear is to fight or flee it. A third option is available: jump deep into the thing that produces the fear. The option isn’t about fighting; it’s about recognizing that the fearful thing may be the one thing that one needs or wants to do.
[Read more…] about How to Handle Fear: Jump into the Deep End
Some days – sometimes many days or weeks or months – you are going to awaken, and you’ll be more tired than or just as tired as when you went to bed. Everything in you argues with the alarm. You wonder how it’s 5:30 a.m. already. You wonder why you set the alarm for such an early hour, then remember you are trying to create a space in which you can do your work. Even so, you struggle not to throw the alarm against the wall. You argue with the voice that says to turn off the alarm and to pull the covers over your head.
“Complement” and “compliment” often are mistaken for each other, much to the chagrin of anyone who knows (read: obsesses about) the difference between the two. It’s an easy mistake to miss, too; the words won’t be flagged by any spell check or grammar check. It’s yet another reason to remember the advice of most writers and editors: do not rely on spell check.
[Read more…] about Write Right: Complement versus Compliment