The muse is a useful fiction

I don’t really believe in the Muse, but I do think that allowing yourself to believe in visitations from an external “muse” or “genius” is a useful fiction. It’s like when practicing Taiji, if you allow yourself to believe that qi energy is flowing through your body, it makes it easier to relax into the […]

The something that happens when you write every day

I’ve been thinking about a quote from Flannery O’Connor that ran in Writers Almanac a while ago. I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place. This doesn’t mean I produce […]