Archive for the 'Fear' Category

Letter to an Anonymous Author

“I am a writer. Therefore, I am not sane.” ― Edgar Allan Poe Dear X, I appreciated your note, my friend. And I’m grateful for it. I’ve seen your struggle and I know how hard you’re working to progress and capture everything well, and also accept help. I knew your journey would be a special challenge, and while your issues
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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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How We May Finally Recover Ourselves

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – T. S. Eliot   The life of faith is a rescue mission, I thought, listening to our pastor preach on the woman at the well in yesterday’s sermon. He explained how
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How Jesus Unblocked My Writer’s Block and Freed Me to Write–for Good

“We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness.” – Thomas Merton All art, writing included, is built on ideas. The size of those ideas can’t be measured,
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Why You Can Never Fail

I need a story about failure,” I said to Sheri and the girls as we sat down to a Saturday night dinner of take-out pizza. “Surely you can help me think of something,” I added, laughing. “Should be plenty of material.”  But whether they knew something they didn’t want to share, or couldn’t think of anything, no one had an answer.
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