Melissa Wiley

From experience, I knew what to do. Write. Write anything. Bad sentences, meaningless sentences, anything to get the mind fixed again to that sheet of paper and oblivious of the ‘real’ world. Write until the words begin to make sense, the cogs mesh, the wheels start to turn, the creaking movement quickens and becomes a smooth, oiled run, and then,

You may produce fewer paintings or novels if you get in the habit of controlling your obsessions, but what you lose in inventory you gain in mental health.

If you can get from San Francisco to Paris in twelve hours, what can’t you do in a month? You could get in a lot of productive obsessing — or learn about your idiosyncratic ways of preventing yourself from using your brainpower. In a month you could produce a brainstorm or learn why you refuse to cultivate one.

Because you have shielded your writing time, you just need to sit down and open a new document. All of the mental energy you would have used to figure out when and where to write can be saved for the actual writing.

they would like to do for its own sake and not because their fathers did it. Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within as the first

IF WE BETTER UNDERSTOOD MEMORY AND IMAGINATION we might discover that memory is in part the way that persistent productive obsessions recombine instantly and that imagination is our repertoire of persistent productive obsessions dynamically recombining.