Fighting the good fight as a novelist

I've always read and heard that the key to success as a soldier in combat is to accept the fact that you will not survive.  Once this basic fact is understood and accepted, then it's possible to move ahead each day meeting obligations as to assignments or missions to be accomplished.

Although the level of gravity is hardly the same, I do see parallels with the process of writing.  Once a writer accepts the fact that he will neither become famous nor rich based on his writing, then, and only then, he can move forward each day attacking the enemy (i.e. the blank page).  It helps, of course, also to accept the fact that the current draft of the current version will be in every instance absolutely worthless.  Once the writer has moved past all that...and persists day to day nonetheless...then and only then something of substance might be accomplished.

And so the fight continues day to day, draft to draft, version to version, toward something of value.

Past as present

Think of the past in color.  Consider sights and smells and sounds and touch as if they were all no less recent than yesterday.  The past was no less current  than your present is now; feelings and emotions no less keenly felt; challenges day to day no less real.  Think of the past in color, considered as if it were today.

J.P. Cunningham
2012

Hemingway on learning how to write

"It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way."
— Ernest Hemingway

Late callings

When vocation comes late,
is the calling less great?

When passion subsides,
distraction laid aside,

The mind concentrates
on what matters most
'fore it's too late.

J.P. Cunningham, 2012

The ambiguity of impressionism

"It's all right...for words and appearances to mean more than one thing--ambiguity is a fact of life."

Eudora Welty, On Writing

Eudora Welty on reading (and writing)

"...learning to write may be a part of learning to read.  For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading....  Only the writing of fiction keeps fiction alive...a society that no longer writes novels is not very likely to read any novels at all."

Eudora Welty, On Writing

The Emerald Amulet

The Emerald Amulet

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