Advice to Writers by Billy Collins Even if it keeps you up all night, wash down the walls and scrub the floor of your study before composing a syllable. Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way. Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration. The more you clean, the more brilliant your writing […]
Anaïs Nin on How We Write to Heighten Our Own Awareness of Life
“We write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write […]
Overcome Writing Doubt: 5 Effective Psychology Techniques
“Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the […]
Annie Dillard on How Reading Can Inspire Us with Wisdom, Courage, and the Possibility of Meaningfulness
“Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is […]
Inspire Portal | Wisdom, Wellness, Writing and Conscious Creativity
The microphone screeched for the third time then the lights went out completely. In a confusing combination of elation and fear, Brighton’s famous theatre was plunged backwards through time, pausing only after reaching the Chinese year of the Water Snake, way back in 1893. The auditorium was dark, it’s guests barely visible behind the stage […]