Book Excerpts
Give us too much self-involvement and we lose our involvement with the world. Yes, then we are boring. When we center our writing lives on our writing instead of on our lives, we leach both our lives and our writing of the nutrients they require. In order to bloom, all of us need a root system. Just as a regular practice of writing roots us firmly in our lives, a regular life roots us firmly in our writing.
When writing dominates a life, relationships suffer and, not coincidentally, so does the writing. When writing is about being shut off from the world in a room sequestered with our own important thoughts, we lose the flow of life, the flow of new ideas and input that can shape, improve, and inform that thought. Writing might profitably be seen as an activity best embedded in life, not divorced from it–of course such a view of writing smacks of heresy.
– Julia Cameron, The Writer’s Life