I recently ran across a quote that perfectly describes my experience with writing short stories and working on a novel, both of which I am doing. The quote is from novelist and short story writer Haruki Murakami, and is in the Introduction to the English edition of his short story collection "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman".

"To put it in the simplest possible terms," he writes, "I find writing novels a challenge, writing short stories a joy. If writing  novels is like planting a forest, then wr...
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When a friend asked me the other day what role humility plays in creating art, I responded that I think it plays an important role. But when I looked the word up in several dictionaries, I found the definitions less than satisfying: “The defining characteristic of an unpretentious and modest person, someone who does not think that he or she is better or more important than others.” Others are: “Modesty, lacking pretense, not believing that you are superior to others,” and “Shifting...

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When I write a poem, it is a way of seeing and distilling what I see in the simplest, clearest and most expressive way possible. When I write a story or a novel, I can be as expansive as I want, but when I write a poem, I try to boil it all down. Not all poets do that. Nikos Kazantzakis, the great Greek-Cretan novelist and poet, wrote "The Odyssey, a Modern Sequel" in the form of a poem, 824 pages long! The language and imagery are incredibly rich. I recall reading it nearly forty years ago a...
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I never thought of myself as a poet, and stumbled onto writing it by accident in 1973 when my typewriter broke right in the middle of a short story I was writing. Being in a writing mood, I began writing poetry and discovered the beauty of it in the rhythm and music of language and imagery. Here's one of the poems that I wrote, which was fist published in 1974 to advertise a reading I was giving.

Spring Poem

This morning walking
to work
                       I saw
leaves
backing out of the
branches...
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The simplest answer is to begin and never stop, because it's in writing that we develop our skills. The problem with many "wannabees" is quitting the minute discouragement arrives, and just like the next hour and the next day, it will arrive.

What's the best way to guard against being defeated by discouragement? Read books by great writers. And read about them. In the early days, I read everything I could lay my hands on about well-known writers and their experience. I bought every single issu...
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