Notes on Writing

Julia Cameron on Writing:

Guilty Pleasure is what writing is all about. It is about attractions, words you can't resist using to describe things too interesting to pass up. And forget lofty motives.

...unrequited love .... the brain enjoys writing. It enjoys the act of naming things, the processes of association and discernment...

.... left to its own devices, writing is like weather. It has drama, a form, a force to it that shapes the day. Just as a good rain clears the air, good writing clears the psyche.

.... amateur is from the Latin "amare" = to love

....writing is about the importance of a sense of direction. Writing is about getting something down as opposed to thinking something up.

.... the former renders a sense of direction, not a sense of strain.

.... Writing rights things .... taking time in out lives gives us the time of out lives. As we describe our environments, we begin to savor them and even the most rushed and pell-mell life begins to take on the patina of being cherished.

Writing is like laying track...mapping your interior and enjoying the sights... what we want to write wants to be written ... my job, then, is to show up on the poage, and let that something move through me....what wants to be written is none of my business.

Valuing our experienceis not narcissism. It is not endless self involvment. It is, rather, the act of paying active witness to ourselves and to our world. Such a witness is an act of dignity, and act that recognizes that life is essentially a sacred transaction of which we know only the shadow, not the shape. As we attune ourselves more and more closely to the value of passing moments, we learn that we are something of moment ourselves.

The Quiet Animal
...
The blood remembers
What the mind forgets.
The soul is a quiet animal.
Given less to thought than memory,
More to dreams than plan,
The soul owes more to half-remembered God
Than waking life as man.

Very often work dries up because it was going so well. We have simply overfished our inner resevoir without having taken the time and care to consciously restock our storehouse of images.