Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun.
Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

—Steven King

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The muses love mornings.

—Benjamin Franklin

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It may be that when we no longer know which way to go that we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendell Berry

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The Art of Essaying

The Art of Essaying

by | Jul 1, 2014 | 2 comments

The word essay comes from French for “to try.” Many, perhaps because of getting assigned lame essays in high school (though none of my teacher friends do that, thank God! 🙂 ), think of essay writing as a tedious rehashings of things we’ve already learned. However, the...

If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories—science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Ray Bradbury

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