Entry #1

I am currently writing a novel. I no longer say "attempting" to write, because I have now decided that I am simply going to write. That I will be a writer, that I am an artist, and that I have greatness within me.
Steinbeck wrote to a friend as a "warm-up" before digging in to write. I think, perhaps, this approach may be more helpful to me than attempting to start cold. Once rolling, I know that I can find prodigious results, but all too often it is the starting that stops me. Perhaps ten, twenty, or thirty minutes, or an hour (or a day) after I sit down I will finally begin to write. So here is my warm-up, my stretching as I attempt to go in already moving. Getting a running start.
Hopefully, too, I can work out tiresome athletic metaphors and not fill my prose with that sort of rubbish.
Back to the decision to write: I will write. I will write and write and write. Steinbeck wrote a self-imposed minimum of 1000 words per day. I see no reason I cannot do this. I often wondered how writers did it, but I believe I am learning. With repetition comes productivity, with productivity comes love. I love writing. I love sitting down to create. I love the realization that, come hell or high water (I am working out cliches too, I suppose), I will write until I have written something worthy of being read. And then I will write more, until I write something more worthy of being read, until someday I can write something that needs to be read.
Steinbeck did it this way. I suppose he is, in some ways, my current muse--by necessity, because of my SR class, but also as an inspiration from a person whose personality nearly mirrors my own, even if our philosophies and theologies do not easily co-exist. (Indulgent side note/extrapolation: The more I learn about Steinbeck, the more I see similarities to myself. Which is encouraging in that I do have the makeup, the constitution, the inborn ability to be a writer...if I can cultivate that, discipline the puer aeternus, chain the eternal boy to a desk and mine until I find diamond.) It is going to happen. It is simply a mechanism, now, of work and time.