Exactly

I write because I love to read. I have loved to read since I was too young to even know what I was reading. For me, writing is the natural extension of reading. It is the other side of the same conversation about what makes our narratives feel special—the unique ways we experience joy, work through relationships and figure out what we want our lives to be. Writing is another way to experience stories, another way to share them. - author Laura Dave at The Divining Wand. Read the entire post; it's a good one.

"Living the focused life...

is not about being happy all the time..." Love this from Ava Jae. Need to make subway art with it.

Gnosticism III

First line has to make your brain race that’s how Homer does it, that’s how Frank O’Hara does it, why at such a pace Muses slam through the house — there goes one (fainting) up the rungs of your strange BULLFIGHT, buttered almost in a nearness to skyblue They pang — Pollock yourself! Just to hang on to life is why -- Anne Carson

If not proud, then honest

"I wanted to be a writer from almost the minute I could imagine “being” anything," says Susan Orlean. Comments like that make me envious and small. If I were smart, I'd take those feelings and channel them to writing. Usually I head to the pantry for snacks and then curl up with a silly book to read.

Children (who grow into adult readers) everywhere are happy for editors like her.

From Shelf Awareness:

"I was taken out to luncheon and offered, with great ceremony, the opportunity to be an editor in the adult department. The implication, of course, was that since I had learned to publish books for children with considerable success perhaps I was now ready to move along (or up) to the adult field. I almost pushed the luncheon table into the lap of the pompous gentleman opposite me and then explained kindly that publishing children's books was what I did, that I couldn't possibly be interested in books for dead dull finished adults, and thank you very much but I had to get back to my desk to publish some more good books for bad children."

-- Ursula Nordstrom, who was head of Harper's department of books for boys and girls from 1940 to 1973 (from the book Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom, which was showcased by the Brain Pickings blog).

Good books for bad children. Love it.

Inventing a horse

Today a friend reminded me of the poem, Inventing a Horse by Meghan O'Rourke, and likened it to inventing the life you want.

Inventing a horse is not easy.
One must not only think of the horse.
One must dig fence posts around him.
One must include a place where horses like to live;

It's true. Creating and living the life you've always wanted doesn't just happen. You don't stumble onto it. You have to make it and be fierce about protecting it and feeding it so it will thrive.

Don’t waste your doubts. Use them to move you forward into that forest, into the pages of that story that you must write.

From the blog post, Does the world really need your story:

When Madeleine L’Engle’s husband says of her new work, “It’s been said better before,” she responds, “Of course, it has. It’s all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I’d never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said, by me, ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn’t what human creation is about. It is that we have to try, to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.”