(no subject)
So here I am at Barnes and Noble, eating an overpriced reheated chicken wrap and black bean soup, and I open up my laptop and check my email -- careful, of course, to not introduce the black bean soup to my laptop. And in that email, I find spam beginning to decorate my last LiveJournal entry, written nearly a year ago. Delete, delete, delete. I'm not sure why spam has sniffed out my LJ, but I'm thinking it's a sign to either come back here and breathe some life into this poor neglected cyber garden (mixing my metaphors, but you'll forgive me, gentle reader, if you're out there, won't you?) or turn over the earth and let someone else plant here. But I can't bear to delete this account, so I guess the former is the way to go.
Since graduating with a bachelor's degree in creative writing last November, I mostly haven't been writing. Mostly. Now, I can never decide whether I am of the school that says you must write regularly, even if it requires you to sweat blood, in order to truly advance in your craft, or the one that says if you must write, you must, and if you simply can't, then don't. But I do believe that just like fields, our writing life has seasons of fertility and drought, seasons when the earth must lie fallow in order to yield a richer harvest later. It is our responsibility, then, to be completely honest with ourselves as to which one it is, whether we are not writing for reasons of crop rotation, or if we are refusing to pursue a necessary discipline. Or if, as I've come to believe for myself, we are somewhere in between both.
Since graduating with a bachelor's degree in creative writing last November, I mostly haven't been writing. Mostly. Now, I can never decide whether I am of the school that says you must write regularly, even if it requires you to sweat blood, in order to truly advance in your craft, or the one that says if you must write, you must, and if you simply can't, then don't. But I do believe that just like fields, our writing life has seasons of fertility and drought, seasons when the earth must lie fallow in order to yield a richer harvest later. It is our responsibility, then, to be completely honest with ourselves as to which one it is, whether we are not writing for reasons of crop rotation, or if we are refusing to pursue a necessary discipline. Or if, as I've come to believe for myself, we are somewhere in between both.