I love the ideas that “writing three drafts is quicker than writing one,” and, “there’s more where that came from.”
As a practicing Christian family physician, I live by a companion motto to that writer’s ethos: “God will give me what I need, when I need it.” It takes faith to turn the doorknob and enter a new patient room sixteen times a day.
Permission to write poorly is so freeing, especially for those of us who have lived too long as perfectionists.
One metaphor I like for overcoming fear of the blank page: getting meat on the cutting board. How enjoyable in the early months of fresh writing when the novelist-as-butcher can alternate each day between laying out slabs of beef and slicing them up.
Thank you for your writing here. It has prompted me to dive into the Wilderking stories (two down and on waiting list for the third). I also enjoyed your bio of Flannery O'Conner. Thanks for demonstrating good writing as well as teaching it.
Agreed! Yet I also love this quote about personhood that appears in the opening to The Reservoir, a devotional by the Renovare Institute (I find it helpful to consider as a creative human):
"If then you are wise, you will show yourself rather as a reservoir than as a canal. A canal spreads abroad water as it receives it, and a reservoir waits until it is filled before overflowing, and thus without loss to itself communicates its superabundant water. In the Church at the present day we have many canals but few reservoirs."
This whole thing is great, especially the skit. But this line is gold: “Creativity is not a reservoir, but a river.”
Delightful.
I love the ideas that “writing three drafts is quicker than writing one,” and, “there’s more where that came from.”
As a practicing Christian family physician, I live by a companion motto to that writer’s ethos: “God will give me what I need, when I need it.” It takes faith to turn the doorknob and enter a new patient room sixteen times a day.
Permission to write poorly is so freeing, especially for those of us who have lived too long as perfectionists.
One metaphor I like for overcoming fear of the blank page: getting meat on the cutting board. How enjoyable in the early months of fresh writing when the novelist-as-butcher can alternate each day between laying out slabs of beef and slicing them up.
Troy Thompson
Thank you for your writing here. It has prompted me to dive into the Wilderking stories (two down and on waiting list for the third). I also enjoyed your bio of Flannery O'Conner. Thanks for demonstrating good writing as well as teaching it.
Agreed! Yet I also love this quote about personhood that appears in the opening to The Reservoir, a devotional by the Renovare Institute (I find it helpful to consider as a creative human):
"If then you are wise, you will show yourself rather as a reservoir than as a canal. A canal spreads abroad water as it receives it, and a reservoir waits until it is filled before overflowing, and thus without loss to itself communicates its superabundant water. In the Church at the present day we have many canals but few reservoirs."
—Bernard of Clairvaux
There are so many good and true statements in this piece. Thank you, Jonathan!
So helpful! Thank you.