Love the cover. I really liked learning about Sue's writing process and all of her insights on how writing and reading heals and develops. I earmarked a ton.
Kicks off with a poem by David Whyte:
Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong..
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
* rather than say, I'm not creative, say " I seem to possess a lot of unrealized creative potential"
"Every person is fundamentally creative. Natural creative acts are taking place inside you around the clock without you even trying. Every night an unknown storyteller comes up with wildly creative dramas in your dreams. Your psyche is constantly metabolizing your experiences, turning them into awakenings, wisdom, revelations, and intentions that invent and reinvent who you are. Even your physical body is busy all day long making new cells and organs, and sometimes new little people.
Humans are also wired to express their creativity by bringing forth something new or new combinations of the old. It doesn't have to be a painting, a book, a symphony, a cure for cancer, or the plans for a Taj Mahal. It could be a flower garden, a decorated cake, a sandcastle, a fishing fly, or a way to teach a child the alphabet.
Creativity is an instinct as powerful as the instinct to eat, and it seeks conscious expression in the world. Expressing it, though, is where things often go awry."
"Merton's "wisdom literature" and Jung's "visionary literary creations" allude to writing that comes from the rich interior life where the soul presides. This inner realm is largely unconscious to us, making it difficult to define. I think of it as the hidden place where images are bred, dreams are choreographed, and experiences are metabolized. A place teeming with feelings, fascinations, memories, myths, symbols, and intuitive flashes"
*on dreams, helping us solve problems,"if we respect our dreams, and possess a healthy expectation, we can take the questions from our waking life into our dream life and our unconscious will try to answer them. That is one of the functions of dreams – helping us become aware of what we are missing in our daily conscious life."
The bones of a good or classic story: "Here's the best definition I can come up with. A story is made up of: (1) a character with a significant want, motive, or problem, (2) who sets out to achieve her or his goal and resolve the problem, (3) and along the way is met by mounting obstacles and antagonistic forces from within and without as she or he chooses, acts, and is acted upon, (4) ultimately leading to a resolution, (5) and to the character substantially changed in the process."
* "Aristotle advises the reader to start in the middle of things, dropping the reader into the heart of the story. The aim is to begin as close to the action as possible."
This is how I have always felt about sentences :"I love a beautiful sentence the way I love a beautiful painting. I'm continuously awed by the sweeping things language can do, all the ways words can be arranged into pieces of art that nourish the soul."
Love this: Isak Dinesen framed it like this: "All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them." I sometimes wonder how many of our sufferings are stories aching to be told."
At the end, she tells a story about a 49 year old executive who grew up in a privileged family, who unwillingly read the secret life of bees. He said he could not relate to the characters coming of age, poor southern, black girl. But in the end it changed him. Leading to the ultimate reason all should read: "with these words he revealed to me one of the most significant reasons I derive meaning from writing. It creates empathy."
She also mentioned many books that I really want to right now, including some of her own, like the pomegranate one and the mermaid chair. As well as others that I need to go back and log.