I read The Artist's Way a few years ago and enjoyed it, although I never really got into "morning pages" as much as I did the general principles and the idea of artist dates, etc. I think it's important for creative people to take time to 'fill the well' intentionally, not just as a side effect of other things in our lives. We all get so busy these days it's hard to make it a priority. My transformational moment, as far as creative writing goes as opposed to technical writing or the scientific stuff I did in school, was doing National Novel Writing Month a few years ago - the idea is to write a first draft of 50,000 of a novel in a month, if you guys haven't heard of it. Of course on that sort of deadline there's no time for the inner editor or to get blocked, you just have to write. Plenty of it ends up being unusable but it is a very freeing experience.
A, I hear ya re the illogical time pressures - sometimes it seems like deadlines are an excuse for someone to do low-quality work and excuse it. Yeah, we all have to get stuff done, but do we really need to be in quite as much of a hurry as we supposedly are? Rachylou, you should come to Silicon Valley - plenty of 'visionaries' here but lots of them have no practical boots on the ground experience on how to run a business or keep employees productive and happy - drives me nuts sometimes.
Nancylee, that's exciting news about your story, congrats! Both of my local critique partners are working on novels, in fact on multi-novel series and sometimes I feel left out because they're planning these huge story arcs. Since I'm into history I've thought of trying to write historical fiction but I haven't tried it yet, too used to the factual approach. I am trying for a more novelistic approach with this current project, more like creative nonfiction than a dissertation.
A, it never occurred to me to think of being a writer when I was younger, even though I was always good at compositions in school and loved to read. I think being a writer was something fancy that artistic people did, not regular folks like me. I had a bit of an early mid-life crisis a few years ago when I realized I hated my job (and there were a lot of other things out of whack in my life too). I realized that what I really wanted to do was to explore ideas for a living, and so that's what I'm trying to do (stumblingly, with intermittent success) now.
