Page after Page by Heather Sellers

“To write you need so very little. You need an honest heart. And some paper. You need to approach your writing life just as you would a romantic partner, not as you would a discipline.

Are you doing a frenzied kind of scary dance in the center of your life to take up the emptiness there? Are you sick of saying you want a writing life, more time for writing, when you keep not doing anything about it?

Choose what you want to be in the center. Sit down, and quit thinking that you are the center. Make your center an inviting place. Stop complaining. If you have the energy and are practiced in the ways of love,put writing in the center just as you would a new lover, the love of your life. If you are committed already, take on writing as a lover on the side.

Let yourself be as passionately pulled to this lover as you would with an affair of the heart. Time will fall away. Love is the only way to create time. You will be happier and you will make the people around you happier if you “shut up and sit down.” Make it seem like you are at least choosing your own life.”

“Ambition. We get afraid of being successful because we are used to things the way they are. Change, even good change, is very scary. Would we be us anymore if you took our writing more seriously? No. We wouldn’t. It’s a little like death. Well, it is exactly like a death. New you writes more. The new you gets good. The old guy, the non writer wanna-be dies. We all say we want this, to be writers, but I can see why so few folks actually put the time in.

You have to be very fearless to change yourself. It’s not very comfortable. Ambition leads to different friends, different clothes, different habits, a different maybe unrecognizable you… Ambition is growth.

To be successful as a writer you have to imagine clearly and fearlessly what you really want. Do you really want to write a bestseller? Because you could. You could read dozens of them and figure out just how to do it. If you focused on this it would happen to you. You could read books on successful people and their habits. You could make yourself into this type of person.

But you would have to not be the person you are right now. “