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...

A simple answer is that I find them everywhere: birds, monkeys, people I meet, communities and even huge cities which, at first glance, seems impossible but in my experience, isn't. To me, “character” has first to do with meeting, then seeing the whole. One definition of character is: “The inherent complex of attributes that determine a persons moral and ethical actions and reactions” (source: WordWeb thesaurus/dictionary), which is what happens when you really get to know someone, w...

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...