“It’s always the vulnerable heart that breaks broken hearts free.” I read a new book recently and it changed me. It helped me realize something I hadn’t before. Books often do that, of course, but not in a quite so fundamentally altering way. You know how when new information comes, there’s always that period of instability before you can even
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Like most who pursue this creative life, while writing I’m more dependent on the daily requirements of my existence than I like to admit. And like most, I’m terrified of losing my routine. The little habits I’ve grown addicted to, of waking and showering and reading, preparing and preserving the ideas and energy for the page, they’ve grown to encompass more of the
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The writing life requires courage…It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. – Dani Shapiro What we don’t know can and does hurt us. The old saying was never true. We hurt when we’re ignorant, and so does everyone else. In fact, I wonder if ignorance is the main reason we experience so much pain in
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I rarely remember it, but I’d be a better writer if I did: What we think about matters. Because attention is a limited resource. Sometimes I remember it’s important to exert energy to reserve my attention and find inspiration to write. And sometimes I completely ignore it. This is not another post on time management. It’s about attention management. I believe there’s a
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Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way. – Donald Miller I used to love Don Miller. I’ve had many writing heroes: Hemingway. Anne Frank. Alex Haley. But after Blue Like Jazz, I felt like Don really got me. He’d written what I was
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