“When
a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.”
Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity
is a must for anyone
interested in writing and life.
You
will enjoy writing if you know yourself:
“If
you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are
only half a writer. It means you are so
busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the
avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don’t even know
yourself.”
“What
do you want more than anything else in the world? What do you love, or what do
you hate?
Find
a character, like yourself, who will want something or not want something, with
all his heart. Give him running orders. Shoot him off. Then follow as fast as
you can go. The character, in his great love, or hate, will rush you through to
the end of the story. The zest and gusto of his need, and there is zest in hate
as well as in love, will fire the landscape and raise the temperature of your
typewriter thirty degrees.”
Are
you hungry about Life?
“It is my contention that in order to
keep a Muse, you must first offer food.
What
is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for
writers, The Muse.”
The
great secret of creativity:
“You
treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you. If yout ry to approach a cat
and pick it up, hell, it won’t let you do it. You’ve got to say, ‘Well, to hell
with you.’ And the cat says, ‘Wait a minute. He’s not behaving the way most
humans do.’ Then the cat follows you out of curiosity: ‘Well, what’s wrong with
you that you don’t love me?’”
Work.
Relaxation. Don’t think.
“WORK.
It is, above all, the word about which your career will revolve for a lifetime.
Beginning now you should become not its slave, which is too mean a term, but
its partner. Once you are really a co-sharer of existence with your work, that
word will lose its repellent aspects.
An
work itself, after awhile, takes on a rhythm. The mechanical begins to fall
away. The body begins to take over. The guard goes down. What happens then?
RELAXATION
And
then the men are happily following my last advice:
DON’T
THINK”
If you are still hungry, read his
interview here.
*****
Click to order I say Who, What, and Where!
Click to order Deconstructing INFATUATION
a thought-provoking novel about infatuation.
an inspirational
novel about the courage to be oneself freely.
a thought-provoking novel about infatuation.
Copyright © 2013 by THE PYTHAGOREAN STORYTELLER. All
rights reserved.
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