Chapter 12: Limit
I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last for a lifetime.
Thank you, Ray Bradbury, but I prefer a muse who woos. Currently, no one can pull words out of me like George Strait, real low in the background so that I can hardly tell he’s singing my favorite sad song, “I Can Still Make Cheyenne.”
I liked this chapter a lot, too. This is a chapter you have to earn. You have to get busy enough to be able to limit.
Don’t be just writers. Don’t be just writers. Don’t be just writers.
I am just a writer.
(OK, I’m also an editor.)
I am probably guilty of taking on too little rather than too much. Some of that is my personality. Some is because there has not been much emotional space or even actual time to consider a hobby. So the fact that I have attended my writers group sporadically and gone out to lunch with friends monthly and attended/volunteered at multiple productions at the Fredericksburg Theater Company and taken up yoga and made friends at boot camp and attended Baylor football games? Not bad. It approaches a life.
5. The things we love or long for often guide us to new and important paths, even in our writing. Is there a difference between a distraction and a beautiful new key? How can we know?
This is the last question in the last chapter. How can we know? We know when we know. I’ve learned to trust my distractions, put them on and take them out to dinner and a movie, so to speak. If that goes well, we go out again. If I want a third date, it’s usually a new key.
Keys do wear out or we get new doors. That’s OK, too.
