drmstream[writing]

This must be the week that small presses, indie jour­nals and agents plow through their in-boxes. I’ve got­ten a slew of rejec­tions this week — no inter­ests on a short novel I’ve been send­ing around, no thanks you’s on a cou­ple of sto­ries that are cir­cu­lat­ing and flat out nopes on an essay I had […]

Sit­ting in the sec­ond story of a two-story row house in Brooklyn’s South Slope, I searched for the voice that would tell my 21-year old daugh­ter Becky some­thing about liv­ing. She’s laid up with a bro­ken foot that’s keep­ing her from work­ing at the micro-distillery where she found a job after com­ing back from Louisiana, […]

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 […]

Some­times you feel like a wet towel, you know. Sure, the con­ven­tional image is an empty bucket. Cre­ativ­ity depleted, the bucket dry and cob­webby. But the towel image is more what it feels like. You are all used up like a wet towel. You can’t absorb any­more. You are cold and damp to the skin. You […]

Image via Wikipedia Recently I’ve been offer­ing guid­ance to a young woman on Pur­pose and Struc­ture. These two con­cepts sound more lofty than they are.  When I talk about Pur­pose, I’m describ­ing the sense of hav­ing a thing to do, a rea­son for mov­ing for one spot to the next. Struc­ture is the sense that […]

I worked my way out of a 20-year pho­bia about writ­ing and now I don’t know what’s what. When I write with focus and sim­plic­ity, I feel the energy of under­stand­ing. I fin­ish the ses­sion glad that I wrote some­thing. Then a stretch passes where I don’t get the glad feel­ing and I don’t write […]

I am not a writer. I am not good enough to be a writer. I don’t have what it takes to be a writer. I want to be a writer. I am not an artist. I want to feel like an artist. I can remem­ber what it felt like to try to write, before I […]

When I hear the words “writer’s block,” I think of some­thing that is big and for­mi­da­ble. The image is wrench­ing: an imag­i­na­tion has been blocked by an organic, but chimeri­cal force. A per­son wants to do some­thing badly, but each time they start off to do it, they are thwarted. It’s like Sisy­phus strain­ing to […]