Natalie Goldberg says practice is a commitment you honor on a regular basis, one that asks you to return to the desk without the promise of outcome, destination, or reward.
You do it because you must, or else you would have to admit you were only pretending.
Julia Cameron goes further. There is an unexpected inner power, she says, that becomes available to a writer who keeps returning to the page. She does not mean inspiration. She means the attentiveness that grows in the silences between sessions, accumulating unseen until the day the work decides you have earned what it has been holding back.
Attentiveness, unlike inspiration, does not arrive. It accumulates.
I know this from my own experience as a writer, and the story of how I learned it, of the uninvited visitor who arrived at my desk while I was working on another book entirely, is the heart of my newest article on Ramos On Craft, my Substack publication for writers who are devoted readers of literary fiction.
If these ideas are pulling at you, the full article is waiting there. And if you find that Ramos On Craft is the kind of writing conversation you have been looking for, I would be glad to have you as a subscriber.
Read the full article here: https://open.substack.com/pub/ramosoncraft/p/the-daily-practice-you-keep-meaning?r=88irfg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
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