Well, I’m out and about again. Having just gotten back from Spain and Chicago, Talia and I are off to Nashville for a conference. I like to travel, and I like to meet new people, but it makes resting a challenge.
Is driving or flying or taking the train restful?
My name is Anna and I am from Filer, Idaho, where the men fight over water rights and the women over 1st place ribbons for peach pie. I lived with my four sisters in the attic of my parent’s barn-red farmhouse with purple and orange shag carpet. When I was fifteen, I would sneak out my window to meet Brett. Brett sang me songs on his guitar and shared his dreams about becoming the next John Lennon. Two years later, on the night Brett left, he gave me a pale green sapphire ring with delicate flanking diamonds. A ring which—two years after that—my mother made me throw in the trash because she (who’d married a man who’d given her a twenty year-old daughter and a nineteen year-old marriage certificate) had found the man I would marry.
PRACTICE
Write about the spring.
Write for fifteen minutes, and when you’re finished, post your practice in the comments section.
And if you post, be sure to comment on a few others.
As I was riding across the steppes of Outer Mongolia (it hurt to sit down for a year afterwards), beneath horizons that appeared to be of limitless blue, I thought this was a country that called for an elemental style.
I’ve always loved Cormac McCarthy and amongst his many talents is the nature of his prose. “Clean and hard as pebbles,” says the Independent on Sunday; “language as subtly beautiful as its desert setting,” the Sunday Times. His style has been likened to The Old Testament and described as, “formidable,” “overpowering,” “transcendent.” To me his writing is beautiful and direct, naked and almost pagan in its connection to the landscape and base human nature.
“…as immediately I stopped disciplining the muse,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald, “she trotted obediently around and became and erratic mistress if not a steady wife.”
Most writers either over discipline their muse or ignore her (or him).
The key to solving your discipline problem is to realize you don’t have a discipline problem. You have a relational problem.
You can either be a good lover or a failed one, a committed wooer or someone who makes lots of promises but doesn’t deliver.
