Kirsten Ogden writes about how-to-write-books in The Kenyon Review:
Make an appointment with myself! Sit down to write! Yes! That is what needed to be done! And I did do this, for about a week. Then I overslept one morning, got bored with the journal entries another morning, and somehow my new, regular, organized, appointment-defined writing life dissipated. This is more a result of my failing and not Ms. Brande’s method. She believes that “The difficulty of writing may be youth and humility,” and I can’t deny that I’m a bit young and a bit afraid of looking or sounding stupid. So, better to have failed while hardly trying, then to have tried hard, and failed, right?
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Jan 3rd, 2008 at 6:46 pm
I don’t think Beckett could have put it better.
Jan 7th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Trouble is it never gets easier…at least, not for me.
jb says: I can’t think of any reason why it should, Patry. Most writers get the occasional gift, but usually it’s a daily slog, mining the unconscious, hunting for gems we’ve hidden ourselves, in the places we’re convinced we’ll be unlikely to find them.
Jan 9th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Wrong.
You can only ever succeed in a difficult task by perseverance.
Read the tale of Robert the Bruce and the spider (Scottish fable) at http://www.showcaves.com/english/explain/History/Bruce.html