With hope, this space will be used to test out words - articles, stories, chapters - and will serve as a challenge in discipline and consistency.
I am the imaginative type, and it doesn't take much to send me into some blurry oblivion of fantasy land. I can take one simple bite of cinnamon apple sauce, and I am thrown in to a daydream about pumpkins and adirondack chairs on the porch of a mountain cabin with John Denver playing on the iPod.
I am aware that I am not the only one. But I do believe that as an artist, it is a duty to take those dreams and express them. And as many people know, this can be difficult. The thought of committing yourself to the act of writing is enough to stop you dead in your tracks. It can be terrifying to bind yourself to such an eternal art.
As William Zinsser says in the early pages of On Writing Well, though writing is a different experience for everyone, "all [writers] are vulnerable and all of them are tense.
They are driven by a compulsion to put some part of themselves on paper, and yet they don't just write what comes naturally. They sit down to commit an act of literature, and the self who emerges on paper is far stiffer than the person who sat down to write. The problem is to find the real man or woman behind the tension."With hopes, I will sit down to "commit an act of literature" and will discover the real woman beneath the superfluous words and dilly-dallying phrases. I am searching for voice, for real truth, for the kind of creative expression that is both cathartic and refining.
Off I go!
