Pivotal to a happy writing life is a practice of daily personal writing.

What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.

Artistic anorexia & sexual avoidance have the same root fears – fear of intimacy, fear of exposure, fear of failure”.

Fatigue can make it hard to have faith. Too much busyness can make it hard to have faith. Too much of too little solitude can impact faith. For that matter, so can a bout of hunger or overwork, anything carried to an extreme. Faith thrives on routine. Look at any monastery and you will see that. Faith keeps on keeping on.

By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.

It is all too easy as an artist to allow the shape of our career to be dictated to us by others. We can so easily wait to be chosen. Such passivity invites despair. To remain healthy and vital, artists must stay proactive in their own behalf.

When writing becomes too dominant, it gets leached of its own power. We spend more and more time writing and we have less and less to write about.