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The Meaning of Creativity
Being free doesn’t mean evading necessity, it means outsmarting it.
— Gary Snyder
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To me one of the hardest things about writing is overcoming the formal style I learnt at University. I like to think of that time as when I was pretending to be left brained, which wasn’t really fooling anyone, but nevertheless I attempted. Somehow this brings me to Anne Lamott because she has a way more intimate style of writing, where she reveals quite a lot about herself, and the inside of her own ‘psyche’ which has quite a twisted sense of humor which I find easy to warm to, and which makes me feel better about myself, and she has good advice about writing.
— Jon Wilson
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Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the snow. One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, “It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do — you can either type or kill yourself.”
…Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning — sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away…
