About Your Writing: The Third Thing
If you wish you could forget something, if it won’t go away after years, it’s because there’s story material there calling out to you.
If you wish you could forget something, if it won’t go away after years, it’s because there’s story material there calling out to you.
Unlike a beginning, which can be anything, we want an ending that can only be one singular thing.
Those questions are a part of you as much as the pain and the longing.
This is when you want to follow what the story is asking of you instead of what you are asking of it.
Flaws create conflict. “Wants” create conflict. And conflict powers stories.
As much as many of us are afraid of changing, the most important events of our lives are always around a great change—getting married, having a baby, the death of a loved one.
Limitations are your ally. The challenge is finding them and seeing them.
Take one step, today’s step, then leave it. Tomorrow you take another step. Whether you feel like it or not. Whether you have focus or not. Whether you feel like a fraud or not. Just take the step.
John Prine will likely be forgotten someday, as will the poet Mary Oliver, but that won’t change the fact that they were able to spend their lives making art and participating in the world in that slowed-down, deep, and full way. And those of us who are not famous? We get that life too, if it’s what we want.