The creative adult

 “The creative adult is the child who survived.” 

                                                                                                                   Ursula K. Le Guin

We are not randomly tossed into this life

   

We are not randomly tossed into this life. We are not an irrelevant, haphazard chance of the universe. Nothing is. There is a purpose to all things, a progression, and a sequence of events that all happen for a reason.

You and I are a part of that grand rhythm, but we are more than that. We are children God placed on this earth by him with the mission to lead an honorable life, to have compassion, to be useful in the world and to have made a difference in the world. 

Taking a wrong turn in life isn’t a permanent condition

 Taking a wrong turn in life isn’t a permanent condition, you turn around and head back so let the life mistakes you made, once you’ve learned what you can from it, go off and die alone.  A mistake, no matter how massive it is, doesn’t define you. Let go of yesterday because yesterday let go of you a long time ago. Every now and then stop and say this out loud “The past is over, I can’t change it. I forgive those who wronged me and I apologize to those I wronged.  And now I need to live for today and the future” Those two sentences can free you.

 Conversely, don’t make the past better than it was nor should you make the present worse than it actually is and the answer to everything isn’t in the future. All that tomorrow offers is a day without any mistakes in it, yet but give it time.  The future will be less resolved then we think and the only way to predict what will happen in the future is to make it happen yourself.  It’s a new day. Here’s your goal; Be better than you were yesterday. This is the opportunity to get it right. 

 

Pay attention to your loved ones.

 When you have a family of your own make sure you don’t lose them by becoming lost in the world. The job will be there tomorrow, but if it isn’t there, there will always be another job and another appointment and another career thing you absolutely have to do…those things will always be there…..  but your family may not be there. People grow, they change and sometimes they move along. Pay attention to your loved ones. Help them grow. See them through a change. Don’t let them move along without you. Don’t lose them.

 

Lead a good life, a full life. Fight for it if you must.

  Lead a good life, a full life. Fight for it if you must. Commit to never leading a compromised life. If you do that, know that at times the price you pay for living your life on your grounds will seem high. But the good life, the fulfilled life, is a treasure, and at the end of our journey we will look back, you and I, and we will realize that all we paid to walk our own path was a mere pittance compared to the magnificence of our prize.       

 

The common virtue of all great people is their sincerity.

  

The common virtue of all great people is their sincerity.

Sincerity and authenticity attracts people.

Sincerity, even in error, is strength.

Sincerity is earnest and it is honorable and makes for a highly effective life.

Sincerity is real so it is rarely chic or cool.  In fact it is the opposite. It can’t be faked. It has to be a part of you. It must permeate all of what you are.

 Work to be sincere. Push the weakness, the hypocrisy and the insincerity out of your existence and fill that void with sincerity.  

 

No matter what the odds, plan to win.

  

Even when you are the clear loser, start writing your victory speech. Don’t ever expect to lose. No matter what the odds, plan to win. History is filled with victories that were stolen from the jaws of sure defeat and it almost always happens at the last moment when all seems lost and hope is almost gone.  History shows us that the winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. But they stayed in the fight. They kept trying. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.

 

Don’t make being happy the goal in your life.

 Don’t make being happy the goal in your life. If you do you that, will always be unhappy because life is hard, it’s filled with disappointments and missed opportunities. People will let you down and all of it will drain away your happiness. 

 Instead, live a life that seeks purpose, that means to improve the world and leave it better than what we found it. Build a life around great passions. Strive to be kind and generous and filled with compassion. Those things are the point of the journey.  Do those things and happiness will find you and fill your life.      

 

 

As difficult as it is, try to build a life that is well grounded in YOUR well-being.

 

As difficult as it is, try to build a life that is well- grounded in YOUR well-being.

Not the other guy’s well-being, not the world’s well-being, but your well-being.

And to do that you must be willing to spend your entire life learning and then practicing what it takes to grow and blossom as a person while doing your best not to merely get by in fulfilling your own happiness and fulfillment.
It is a worthy and noble life’s pursuit.

Here’s one way to start. Take one hour a day and give it to yourself as a present. Savoy it, enjoy it, relax in it, it’s yours. 

thoughts

 If you realized how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a negative thought. 

 
We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.  

William Safire on writing

1. Remember to never split an infinitive.

2. The passive voice should never be used.

3. Do not put statements in the negative form.

4. Verbs have to agree with their subjects.

5. Proofread carefully to see if you words out.

6. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.

7. A writer must not shift your point of view.

8. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)

9. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!

10. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.

11. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.

12. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.

13. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.

14. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.

15. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.

16. Always pick on the correct idiom.

17. The adverb always follows the verb.

18. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.

 

 

 

Neil Gaiman on writing

1. Write.

2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

7. Laugh at your own jokes.

8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

  

Margaret Atwood on wiriting

  

1. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3. Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

4. If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.

5. Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

6. Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What ­fascinates A will bore the pants off B.

7. You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

8. You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

9. Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

10. Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visual­isation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

 

 

George Orwell on writing

  

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Henry Miller on writing

  

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.

2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”

3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.

4. Work according to the program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!

5. When you can’t create you can work.

6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.

7. Keep human! See people; go places, drink if you feel like it.

8. Work with pleasure only.

9. Discard the Program when you feel like it–but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.

10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterward.

 

John Steinbeck on writing

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person–a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it–bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.

5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.

6. If you are using dialogue–say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

 

 “As you write,” Steinbeck says, “trust the disconnections and the gaps. If you have written what your eye first saw and you are stopped, see again. See something else. Take a leap to another image. Don’t require of yourself that you understand the connection. Some of the most brilliant things that happen in fiction occur when the writer allows what seems to be a disconnected image to lead him or her away from the line that was being taken.”

 

 

Ray Bradbury on writing

  

• Don’t start out writing novels. They take too long. Begin your writing life instead by cranking out “a hell of a lot of short stories,” as many as one per week. Take a year to do it; he claims that it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row. He waited until the age of 30 to write his first novel, Fahrenheit 451. “Worth waiting for, huh?”

• You may love ’em, but you can’t be ’em. Bear that in mind when you inevitably attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to imitate your favorite writers, just as he imitated H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and L. Frank Baum.

• Examine “quality” short stories. He suggests Roald Dahl, Guy de Maupassant, and the lesser-known Nigel Kneale and John Collier. Anything in the New Yorker today doesn’t make his cut, since he finds that their stories have “no metaphor.”

• Stuff your head. To accumulate the intellectual building blocks of these metaphors, he suggests a course of bedtime reading: one short story, one poem (but Pope, Shakespeare, and Frost, not modern “crap”), and one essay. These essays should come from a diversity of fields, including archaeology, zoology, biology, philosophy, politics, and literature. “At the end of a thousand nights,” so he sums it up, “Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff!”

• Get rid of friends who don’t believe in you. Do they make fun of your writerly ambitions? He suggests calling them up to “fire them” without delay.

• Live in the library. Don’t live in your “goddamn computers.” He may not have gone to college, but his insatiable reading habits allowed him to “graduate from the library” at age 28.

• Fall in love with movies. Preferably old ones.

• Write with joy. In his mind, “writing is not a serious business.” If a story starts to feel like work, scrap it and start one that doesn’t. “I want you to envy me my joy,” he tells his audience.

• Don’t plan on making money. He and his wife, who “took a vow of poverty” to marry him, hit 37 before they could afford a car (and he still never got around to picking up a license).

• List ten things you love, and ten things you hate. Then write about the former, and “kill” the later — also by writing about them. Do the same with your fears.

• Just type any old thing that comes into your head. He recommends “word association” to break down any creative blockages, since “you don’t know what’s in you until you test it.”

• Remember, with writing, what you’re looking for is just one person to come up and tell you, “I love you for what you do.” Or, failing that, you’re looking for someone to come up and tell you, “You’re not nuts like people say.”

 

Seated Bacchus. Roman relief, 1st century AD

 

Thought you might need to hear this......

 

“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.”HENRY MILLER

 

When people look at my

 

‘When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.’ ROBERT FRANK

20 Essential Positive Traits to Make Your Characters Empathetic to Readers

 20 Essential Positive Traits to Make Your Characters Empathetic to Readers

1. Empathy: The character demonstrates an understanding of others' feelings and shows compassion.
2. Courage: The character faces fears or challenges bravely, inspiring admiration.
3. Determination: The character persists in achieving their goals despite obstacles, earning respect.
4. Kindness: The character is compassionate and considerate towards others, evoking warmth.
5. Humor: The character has a sense of humor, making them endearing and relatable.
6. Honesty: The character is truthful, creating trust and a sense of reliability.
7. Vulnerability: The character shows vulnerability, making them more human and relatable.
8. Curiosity: The character is curious and open-minded, inviting readers to explore with them.
9. Resilience: The character bounces back from setbacks, inspiring hope and admiration.
10. Generosity: The character is generous, creating a sense of goodwill.
11. Loyalty: The character is loyal to their values or to others, inspiring trust and admiration.
12. Optimism: The character maintains a positive outlook, even in difficult situations, inspiring hope.
13. Creativity: The character is imaginative and innovative, sparking curiosity and admiration.
14. Wisdom: The character demonstrates wisdom beyond their years, earning respect and admiration.
15. Integrity: The character acts according to a strong moral code, earning respect and trust.
16. Empowerment: The character empowers others, creating a sense of inspiration and admiration.
17. Altruism: The character acts selflessly for the greater good, inspiring admiration and empathy.
18. Resourcefulness: The character is resourceful in solving problems, earning respect and admiration.
19. Independence: The character is independent, inspiring admiration and respect.
20. Passion: The character is passionate about their goals, inspiring admiration and motivation.

This is interesting and explains why so things in the US are turning into junk

 

Brusque

  

 

 Brusque comes ultimately from bruscus, the Medieval Latin name for butcher’s broom, a shrub whose bristly, leaf-like twigs have long been used for making brooms.

 Bruscus was modified to the adjective brusco in Italian, where it meant “sour” or “tart.” French, in turn, changed brusco to brusque, and the word in that form entered English in the 1600s.

 English speakers initially applied brusque to tartness in wine, but the word soon came to describe a harsh and stiff manner, which is just what you might expect of a word bristling with associations to stiff, scratchy brooms.

Good Hours by Robert Frost

  

 

I had for my winter evening walk—No one at all with whom to talk,

But I had the cottages in a row

Up to their shining eyes in snow.

 

And I thought I had the folk within: I had the sound of a violin; I had a glimpse through curtain laces

Of youthful forms and youthful faces.

 I had such company outward bound.

I went till there were no cottages found.

I turned and repented, but coming back

I saw no window but that was black.

 Over the snow my creaking feet

Disturbed the slumbering village street

Like profanation, by your leave,

At ten o’clock of a winter eve.