Writing is like playing a sport: if we want to get better, we have to practice everyday. If we want to write, for example, we have to write every morning when we wake up (or, depending on our schedule, every afternoon). But we don’t just simply write- we write to improve a particular skill, … Continue reading
Shakespeare originally coined the phrase “jealousy is a green-eyed monster” but it’s so widely circulated that today the expression has passed into common speech. Why has this image endured for centuries? What spared this characterization from fading into oblivion when so many others slipped into the dusty cracks of history? I suspect it’s because no other writer … Continue reading
When asked what “big magic” inspired her to write Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert replied that as a writer she most often met people who yearned to live creatively but could (or would) not. When she talked to these people, they always had sensible reasons why they couldn’t get to the … Continue reading
How many of us associate big, monumental birthdays with nervous breakdowns? In her exquistely raw advice column Dear Sugar, Cheryl Strayed attempts to console 26 year old Elissa Bassist, a disheartened aspiring writer who wonders how she can “reach the page” when she can barely “lift her face off the bed.” Like many of us, … Continue reading
French-Russian novelist Francine Du Plessix Gray always begins her writing classes by asking students to compare the following sentences, the first from Nabokov’s memoir of his youth in pre-Revolutionary Russia, Speak Memory, the second from Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. “She turned on the steps to look back at me before descending into a jasmine-scented, … Continue reading
e.e. Cummings once said that “to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best- night and day- to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” Journaling is the greatest bulwark in this battle. Writing and reading, everyday, … Continue reading
What does it take to be forever immortalized amidst literary gods: talent or motivation? Though our culture often emphasizes the significance of innate talent, I am here to debunk that popular myth once and for all. Determination-the sheer inextinguishable will to get things done- is (and always will be) the better predictor of success. Desire precedes … Continue reading
The Blank-Faced Confidante 