“Your art is where the drama belongs, not your life,” wrote artist, and author, Julia Cameron. Yet life by its very nature is frequently laden with drama, difficulties too, and sometimes that may prevent your writing from happening, distract you, or hamper with your flow. It’s hard to create anything if you’ve a thousand other concerns or your heart hangs heavy in your […]
The Finest Way to Reignite Your Love of Writing
A sequel, or perhaps prequel to: 15 Ways to Fall in Love with Writing [All Over Again] “Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatise 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 […]
10 Brilliant Tips for Writing Fiction Inspired by Famous Authors
Discover Your Story in the Act of Writing It’s natural to want to know where your story is headed or at the very least, know that you are not wasting your time — especially on something as grand as the first draft of a novel — but it’s not always easy to relinquish control and let the act of writing itself discover your story. Yet often it is in doing […]
Music | Happy Birthday Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong
“The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.” ~ Louis Armstrong In honour of Louis “Satchmo” “Pops” “Ambassador Satch” Armstrong’s 114th birthday today, instead of sharing a poem, here’s a little musical interlude for you […]
Juice Bar | What to Eat to Keep Calm & Creative
Following on from last week’s post, find calm equilibrium with these nutritional tips for stressed out creatives. Writers and artists aren’t necessarily known for their healthy dietary habits. Honore de Balzac famously consumed as many as 50 cups of coffee every day. Andy Warhol was equally hooked on sugar. Alice B. Toklas published a recipe for hashish fudge. While Edvard Munch […]
Poetry | Call Me by My True Names By Thich Nhat Hanh
Natalie Goldberg on Stepping Out Your Own Way & How Writing Frees Us
“Simply step out of the way and record your thoughts as they roll through you. Writing Practice spends the heart and mind, helps to keep us flexible so that rigid distinctions between apples and milk, tigers and celery disappear. Every minute we change. It is a great opportunity. At any point, we can step out […]
Poetry | Remember By Joy Harjo
Remember By Joy Harjo Remember the sky that you were born under, know each of the star’s stories. Remember the moon, know who she is. I met her in a bar once in Iowa City. Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the strongest point of time. Remember sundown and the giving away to night. Remember your birth, how your mother struggled to give you form and […]
15 Ocean-Inspired Storytelling Tools & Tips
Every writer has days where they feel a little deflated, distracted or depleted of wonder — especially when working on a project as grand as a novel. With short fiction too, it’s natural for this ebb and flow. Although each of us must find our own process, if your writing runs a little dry or you’re feeling uninspired, try these […]
Joseph Conrad on Fiction, Art and the Power of the Written Word
Fiction — if it at all aspires to be art — appeals to temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the […]