drmstream[writing]

Two things have hap­pened over the past week: I let my daily rou­tine of post­ing here slip; and, I’ve gone back to a note­book from last year to visit the two pages that are dupli­cated above. I’m try­ing to under­stand how they are related. The notes were the begin­ning of an essay on writer’s block. I’ve […]

< My 12 year old is being taught how to keep a writer’s note­book in his Eng­lish class. It’s a won­der­ful gift that he approaches with un-self con­scious enthu­si­asm. Here’s a page.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.  ~George Robert Giss­ing The first time I read Flan­nery O’Connor I had to pause, go back and read para­graphs again, because the vivid­ness of her world had […]

Matt kept the books apart on a spe­cial shelf in his writ­ing room.  It was hard to say which one he val­ued the most.  There was the copy of On the Road.  He didn’t know if it was a first edi­tion, but he’d found it down in his grandmother’s base­ment, so he fig­ured his mother […]

That’s my 12-year old son. I’m sit­ting in the leather chair play­ing around with a draw­ing pro­gram on the iPad. “What are you doing?” “Draw­ing.” “You can’t draw.” “Any­one can draw.” “No they can’t.” “Stay still.” A cou­ple of sec­onds. He watches me. He’s curi­ous, a lit­tle skep­ti­cal, and knows that I’m unpre­dictable enough to draw an orange cir­cle that I’ll […]

I The world is so big, there is so much to com­pre­hend, that we are best start­ing with some­thing small, some­thing pre­cise — a sim­ple story, an image, an idea –and then writ­ing every­thing we can think about it, and let that writ­ing take us to places we hadn’t antic­i­pated going. II When you write, don’t […]

Ham­mett is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he him­self thought the most of is the record of man’s devo­tion to a friend. He was spare, fru­gal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writ­ers can ever do. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written […]

I want to assure you with all earnest­ness that no writ­ing is a waste of time — no cre­ative work where the feel­ings, the imag­i­na­tion, the intel­li­gence must work. With every sen­tence you write, you have learned some­thing. It has done you good. It has stretched your under­stand­ing. I know that. Even if I knew […]

A writer is some­one who spends years patiently try­ing to dis­cover the sec­ond being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writ­ing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or lit­er­ary tra­di­tion, it is a per­son who shuts him­self up in a […]

The clues are every­where, but it isn’t until you see the title that the entire mean­ing becomes clear. I stum­bled across these paint­ings because I fol­low the artist on Twit­ter. Her han­dle is @julia_hensley. I don’t fol­low her because she’s an artist; a writer that I fol­low fol­lows her and I added her as I […]