Showing category "The Creative Process" (Show all posts)

Saburo Toyoda, artist

Posted by George Polley on Monday, February 25, 2013, In : The Creative Process 
This post began as a longer article, published in SWI (Speak Without Interruption), on August 21, 2009. It is a testimony to the persistence of some of us, who simply do not quit.

Saburo Toyoda was born in Japan in 1908. He has been a painter since childhood. Graduating from high school, he went from his small village to the big city to follow an art career, but no one liked his paintings, so  he became a junior high school teacher and continued his painting on the side, marrying and raising f...

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When your well runs dry, wait...

Posted by George Polley on Monday, April 19, 2010, In : The Creative Process 
... it will replenish itself if you relax and don't panic.

I recently hit a "flat" place while working on chapter 5 in my novel about Seiji, the Asakusa Tokyo artist. He had just arrived in Princeton, New Jersey to visit old friends David and Noriko Sakamoto, and I got stuck. I felt tired,deleted, and wanted nothing so much as to go to sleep.

"Hmmm," I said; "wonder if we're both suffering a little jet lag and culture shock?" We were (at least I was, culture shock that is). He'd never visited t...

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The Creative Process

Posted by George Polley on Saturday, February 6, 2010, In : The Creative Process 

Where do stories, poems and novels come from? Do they come from an outline and a plan? Sometimes, and for some writers, most or all of the time. When you begin a project, should you stay with it (a novel, say) before moving on to something else? Again, this seems to depend on the writer and the way his or her imagination works. Haruki Murakami, for instance, shifts from writing a novel to writing short stories to writing another novel, then back again.


For me the process is somewhat diffe...


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About Me


George Polley I'm an author, fiction writer and poet. My recent publications are "The Old Man and The Monkey" and "Grandfather and the Raven", both published by Night Publishing (UK); a collection of short stories, "Fernandez' Tale and Other Stories", and a poetry collection "Seeing: Collected Poems, 1973-1999", published by Tortoise & Hare, both out of print. I love telling stories, so drop by from time to time for updates. My publisher is Taylor Street Publishing in San Francisco, California.