I’m following the lure of online writing. It’s so attractive having work up on the Internet that could be read by other people. There’s nothing forcing them to come and read, but I’m writing. And in writing I’m doing my practice. As George Leonard writes in his excellent book Mastery, “What is mastery? At the heart of it, mastery is practice. Mastery is staying on the path.”
All writing that you do should receive attention, though often urgency is a writer’s enemy and we make do. Sometimes the white heat of urgency can deliver some of our best and most complete writing. Poems, I find, come out nearly fully, formed needing only the smallest of tweaks.
Flow. Such an well coined meaning to an old word. In that place of mind where things become timeless and the work you do pours out like a river in full bore. Some feel Zone is a better kind of the place they find themselves, when all goes well with their works.
But it’s the practice, coming back, day after day, to write, that offers the best chance of getting to the zone or entering flow.
It used to annoy me when people like Stephen King said that they never wrote for the money. “Yeah, that’s fine for you with your millions,” I would think. But of late I believe that I now agree with that statement. I don’t write for the money any more. It taints all that you do if you let it. Write because that’s what you do. Because you need to get it off you chest or you have to let others know or you have a story to tell. Do it for sanity sake. Do it to explore your thinking. Do it because it a very human thing to do.
Bibliography:
Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment. See Amazon in the UK
