For those of us who truly care about writing, owning our author-ity as an author is sometimes a challenge, both because there is almost always a writer more successful than we are, and also because there are so many pretenders. I was on a long bus trip across country years…
That is what co-owner Miranda Innes calls women who show up in at her Moroccan B&B alone. Yet I would not recommend it for the feminine faint of heart. A woman alone in a souk with her own pocketbook in tow throws Moroccan male concepts of where a woman should be…
First time I drove a car, my father told me to get in to our aging Cadillac and drive it down the main street of Perkasie, our small town In retrospect, I am impressed with his confidence in me, that he thought I had the skill of driving naturally. Only…
When we grow emotionally, it affects people around us. As we change the stance we take in the world, and the stance we take for ourselves, how people perceive and interact with us must also change. But this doesn’t always happen simultaneously. Often there is a lag, For example, let’s…
Work creates a structure in our lives. A steady job circumscribes our time. Instead of circadian rhythms, we adapt to corporate rhythms, rising with the echoes of old punch clocks and factory whistles, timing our commute to the tides of our Interstate rivulet. Even our yearly cycles have the imprint…
NaBloPoMo (nah-blow-POE-moe) is a blog-centric riff on NaNoWriMo. (nan-oh-WRY-moe). Lest you think I am writing gibberish, let me expand. NoNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month –which occurs annually in November. Their tag line is “November 1-30, 2012: thirty days of literary abandon!” Joining is free–over 300,000 writers do join–and you…
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Rachel Vail’s “Permission not to have to be Mozart” really resounds for me. I have wrestled with the myth that, to write and let you read it, my thinking has to be fully mature, complete, finished—and that five years from now, I’d agree 100% with what I wrote. There is something daunting about the permanence of the written word. A phone call fades, even e-mail is more likely to be deleted than not. But a written note can be taken out and read over and over again, over time. And it continues to speak from the person who wrote it—who I might not be in five years. Read more »
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There is some lively discussion within these interviews about if and how you can learn writing from a teacher. Caroline Bird expresses skepticism, then off the tape revised her position, saying, “I think you can teach the craft of writing. The art of writing has to come from within, that cannot be taught.” Talent without discipline is not fruitful, but discipline without talent lacks effective voice. Read more »
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When you choose voice, you know someone is not going to agree with you. There will be opposition, criticism. There are two ways to deal with criticism: either get a strong thick skin, or a strong inner core.
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