Sublime

It could be a flash of memory: your grandfather’s false teeth; how the lilacs smelled last June when you weren’t there; who you were in your saddle shoes at eight years old. It could be anything. Add to the list anytime you think of something. Then when you sit down to write, you can just grab a topic from that list and begin.

Style is as simple and direct as that. It requires digesting your experience, whatever that experience is, so you may write about it.

A particularly elegant commentary on this instinct came from the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, who said that—when one is learning how to write poetry—one should not expect it to be immediately good. The aspiring poet is constantly lowering a bucket only halfway down a well, coming up time and again with nothing but empty air. The frustration is imm

Commit yourself to a weekly artist’s date, and then watch your killjoy side try to wriggle out of it.

We must continue to work the compost pile, enriching it and making it fertile so that something beautiful may bloom