It’s difficult to practice thinking and seeing small when you first arrive in France. Your cell phone isn’t working, you’ve just tasted one of the best cheeses you’ve ever sampled in your life, you’re trying to speak French every chance you get—and at the same…
Who wouldn’t feel overwhelmed in my shoes? I’m leaving a home I love for two months in France—which I also love. Besides being faced with so very much to complete, arrange, provide and plan for, I’m struggling with all the emotions triggered by separation. This…
I have to confess to feeling perpetually disappointed that my book has sold so few copies. It’s a disappointment that still hovers over me, sometimes at quite an altitude, other times much closer to my head. For months, I did my best to promote “Small,”…
A friend who lives in the Midwest recently sent me a note: “Today I can see the very first snowdrops bloom near my back door. And the winter aconites (small buttercup-like flowers) are starting to show their tiny yellow buds, jutting barely above the dead…
Last night, lying in bed next to my seven-year-old granddaughter Amelie, waiting for her to fall asleep, I began concentrating on the music playing on her boom box. It was a disc titled “Chill with Chopin,” and as I listened to what I think was…
It’s the first weeks into the new year, and a perfect time to make one resolution about your writing practice. Remember, only one. Begin by thinking about your writing. How often do you come to the page? For how long? How many pieces have you…
Driving home after dark last night, I turned onto a block festooned for Christmas. With all the colored lights twinkling at me, I realized that, this year, I wanted to help writers give themselves the gift of writingfor Christmas. It’s actually an easy gift to give–and it’s…
Trusting the writing process is an ongoing practice. Once you’ve learned to trust enough to complete a draft of whatever you set out to write, you then have to practice trusting the revision process, which includes several stages. Most important here, is to remember that…
Once you’ve trusted your imagination enough to sit down and begin writing, next, you have to learn to trust the writing process. So many of the writers I’ve worked with forget—or have never known—that fine writing doesn’t happen all at once; it takes place step…
Have you ever gotten an idea for a story or an essay and dismissed it immediately? Too complicated, too ordinary, uninspired, already been done are some of the condemnations my clients toss at their ideas. “But how do you know without even starting?” I ask.…