just for fun – Andrew Careaga

Switching it up

Featuring an exclusive golden shovel poem

One of the valuable bits of advice I did not cover in a recent Friday Five post about the book Writers on Writing was this morsel from the essay by Rosellen Brown (author of Tender Mercies and much more):

If it begins to feel too easy to do something, change forms. Make yourself an amateur in a new genre.

Let’s have fun with it

Writing should not be drudgery

Sometimes, we writers take ourselves too seriously. We’re so busy writing and revising, polishing our jewels of poetry and prose to a high gloss, obsessively monitoring book sales or social media likes, and fretting over audience reaction — will anyone read it? will it even get accepted? — that we forget to enjoy the exciting, invigorating process of the creative act.

We would do well to heed the guidance of Sgt. Hulka from the comedy Stripes and “lighten up, Francis.”

Maybe I’m just giving myself a pep talk here. Maybe no on else takes themselves so seriously. Or maybe you’ve got those worrisome thoughts of perfectionism crawling around in the back of your mind like a cluster of spiders (I envision the daddy long legs variety: creepy but ultimately harmless).