My Writing Life

Welcome to my blog! I hope you will enjoy reading it and will comment, bookmark it, etc, etc.

One of the pieces of useful received wisdom about being a writer is that you should keep a journal. Mentors, creative writing teachers and workshop leaders always encourage you to do this. The journal is supposed to be a daily building up of resources, a library in which all your brilliant ideas are carefully (and legibly!) recorded and to which the writer can turn whenever she experiences a block or is stuck for ideas or lines.

Excellent as this exhortation is, I personally have never succeeded, despite numerous attempts, to keep a journal going for more than a few days. My shelves are piled with started journals, each begun in good faith and with enthusiasm, and abandoned after a few pages. The problem for me is a journal is something you write only for yourself and so nobody knows if you don’t do it!

This, I confess, is one of my main reasons for starting a blog. There is always a chance that there is someone out there waiting for the next bit, and I can’t let them down.

So here it is my first blog, oozing with the intention of being disciplined and keeping it up. Please help me by letting me know you are out there reading it.

I am quite an enthusiastic blog reader myself, especially of other poets’ blogs, and as we go on I will recommend some good ones I come across. I have been reading quite few lately in order to work out how to do mine.

So here goes: to start with, at least, my blog will have three sections and will be written and posted once every week. The sections will be, this one, My Writing Life, in which I will tell you what has been happening for me as a writer this week, the second will be Reading Week, in which I will recommend a poem or poets or anything else: articles, books etc, that I have enjoyed reading and a few comments about why I enjoyed or am enjoying them. The last section may not be there every week, but when it does occur it will be called Hare in the Headlights! this could be rant, a cry for help with a writing problem, or pretty well anything else.

So come back next week for the next post, see you then.

Lizzy