The Writing Life
If anyone ever tells you that being creative is easy or gets easier, look him or her in the eye and say, “You’re a liar.” Go ahead. I give you permission because here’s the grim, true reality: being creative is hard.
[Read more…] about Creative Life Truths: Being Creative is Hard
“Pick yourself back up” sounds nice in theory, but I question the phrase’s application. Oh, I understand the concept. I would like to think I’m capable of picking myself back up again. Many times I’m not.
“…that’s the beauty of blog writing—it’s an invitation to enter into the middle of a story without the pressure of either having to know the beginning or close it up neatly.
“A blog is often a collection of middle narratives, reflections that happen in between beginnings and endings.”
— Emily P. Freeman, “Before Helpless Turns to Hopeless”
A writer is not a writer because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, or because everything she does is golden. A writer is a writer because, even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. — Junot Diaz
After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other hand, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection. – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
A common saying is “don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees.” I tend to have the problem. I now and then mistake the trees for the forest.