Archive for the motivation Tag

Why Do We Do This? Thoughts on Writing and Letting Your Life Speak

There’s a cage I’ve known. For longer than I care to remember now (the archive in the sidebar shows 2004), I’ve questioned why I write. Why I feel like I should. It wasn’t enough just to say what Parker Palmer says in Let Your Life Speak.  As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with
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A Tip for Finishing

Having worked with many writers over the years, I’ve noticed that no matter what most motives us to write–personal, professional, spiritual, or emotional reasons–all writers have difficulty getting free of concerns about how their work will be received. Some of this is justified and positive, of course. It keeps us from publishing work that isn’t up to our high standards.
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Why It’s So Important to Choose Your Music Before Writing

I’m looking for the right music to set the mood… …because of course every artist is in training to concentrate more fully on the experience of the movement of their art. Writers train to hear the rhythm in the words. Musicians strain to hear the music in the notes…. So the question is what am I going to notice? What to
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Writer Pitfalls: When You’re Too Ambishish to Fishish

The hardest part about writing a novel is to fishish.  – Ernest Hemmingway I began this novel when our oldest daughter was 1. I’m still not done. In a month, she’s headed to high-school.  When she was done eating, she’d wave her hands and say, “Fishished!” She wasn’t, of course, but that didn’t matter. She had important things to do.
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Why Writing Well Is All About Intensity

“…I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a fancy way of saying I started writing.”   I taught fiction at Mt. Hermon last week. The most
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