The Writing Life

When I was an undergraduate at “Reed’s Fine College,” someone dropped a piece of wisdom on me that ran more or less like this: “First-rate writers lead second-rate lives, while second-rate writers lead first-rate lives.”

I did not want to hear it at the time. I wanted to be colorful and unique and sexually desirable and all that. Later, I started to think that there might be something to it. Your energy is finite. You can put it into your real work (to borrow Gary Snyder’s phrase), or you can put it into something else.

The author of the Outer Life blog has some thoughts on the matter too. I think that I will be adding him to the blogroll–I have been reading Outer Life for more than a year now, and it is one of the best-written diarist blogs that I have found.

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