Reading Stephen King’s book, On Writing, was like being cornered and forced to have a long, drawn out mental enema.
In the back of my mind was the constant hankering, almost yearning, to write but something always stopped me in my tracks. Or if I did find my way to put a pen to paper or finger on a keyboard I’d give up after a few minutes. I’d find other things to do: Anything but writing.
I was a new devotee of Eastern mysticism and even though I did not join that particular group, I could well have done. They seemed a bit extreme but I regarded myself as not quite ready.
I decided to write about the myths of divorce.
For a long period in my life – it lasted about 10 years – I had writer’s block.
My biggest excuse to others and myself was that I had writer’s block, as if it was some kind of illness.
I have never been nervous in all my life and I have no patience with people who are. If you know what you are going to do, you have no reason to be nervous. And I knew what I was going to do.
My inner critic who had begun piping up about how hopeless I was and how I didn’t know to write.
When you hear the voice of Rosa Ponselle, you hear a fountain of melody blessed by the Lord.
My block was due to two overlapping factors: laziness and lack of discipline.
If you really want to write, then shut yourself in a room, close the door, and WRITE. If you don’t want to write, do something else. It’s as simple as that.
Krishna children were taught that in the spiritual world there were no parents, only souls and hence this justified their being kept out of view from others, cloistered in separate buildings and sheltered from the evil material world.
It was not uncommon for the children to be told they were being treated this way because it was their bad karma and they must have hurt a child in a past life.
In the early 1930s, flying from England to Australia was the longest flight in the world. It was considered extremely dangerous and hazardous, pushing pilots to the limits of mechanical skills and human endurance. Aviation was young.
A wonderful emotion to get things moving when one is stuck is anger. It was anger more than anything else that had set me off, roused me into productivity and creativity.