Bloodchild

“An old habit,” God said. “That’s the trouble with habits. They tend to outlive their usefulness.”

“Why,” she dared to ask, “do you look like a twice-live-sized, bearded white man?” In fact, seated as he was on his huge thronelike chair, he looked, she thought, like a living version of Michelangelo’s Moses, a sculpture that she remembered seeing pictured in her college art-history textbook about twenty years before. Except that God was more full

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.

don’t worry about imagination. You have all the imagination you need, and all the reading, journal writing, and learning you will be doing will stimulate it. Play with your ideas. Have fun with them. Don’t worry about being silly or outrageous or wrong. So much of writing is fun. It’s first letting your interests and your imagination take you anywh

That’s why I’ve called this mild little essay “Furor Scribendi”—“A Rage for Writing.” “Rage,” “Positive Obsession,” “burning need to write” … Call it anything you like; it’s a useful emotion.

Write. Write every day. Write whether you feel like writing or not. Choose a time of day. Perhaps you can get up an hour earlier, stay up an hour later, give up an hour of recreation, or even give up your lunch hour. If you can’t think of anything in your chosen genre, keep a journal. You should be keeping one anyway. Journal writing helps you to b

Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.

I have no doubt at all that the best and the most interesting part of me is my fiction.

Obsession can be a useful tool if it’s positive obsession. Using it is like aiming carefully in archery.