“Your first task as a creative person is to ‘mind your mind’ and think thoughts that serve you. Doesn’t it make sense to speak to yourself in ways that help you create more deeply and more regularly, that allow you to detach more effectively from the everyday chaos of ordinary life, that decrease your anxiety […]
My friend Beverly sent me this list, with a note, “Works for novels, too.” Billy Wilder’s ten rules of good filmmaking: 1: The audience is fickle. 2: Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go. 3: Develop a clean line of action for your leading character. 4: Know where you’re going. 5: The […]
A conversation this morning about fear and what to do with it, and then this quote in my afternoon reading: “The pain is in the aversion. The healing magic is attention. Properly attended to, pain can answer our most crucial questions, even those we did not consciously frame. The only way out of our suffering […]
“It is learning to discipline ourselves to stay with a question long enough to determine what insight it has for us that is important. Otherwise we will simply know what everyone else knows about it. As Goethe puts it, ‘All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart knows more.’” -Joan Chittister