This being my first ever blog entry, it seems like something profound, memorable or at least a bit ‘catchy’ would be warranted. I know a writer, Susan Montag, who teaches writing techniques in workshops for writers and to college students, who told me that perhaps the biggest obstacle to writing is that we all want it to be very good writing from the onset and therefore find it very difficult to actually start writing. She had a solution for this kind of self-imposed pressure...
She said the first thing to do was to buy a notebook, and not all that good a notebook. The very worst ones were the beautiful kind, hardbound and made with tasteful covers and expensive high-quality paper. She said that very few people could bring themselves to write anything at all in this kind of notebook as hardly anybody’s writing was all that good as a first draft. Purchasing that kind of notebook was the surest way to never get started.
Her instructions were to go to a drugstore, maybe even Wal-mart, and buy the cheapest, crappy spiral-bound one that you could find. The next step, she said, was to find some pens, and scribble up the cover as well as quite a few of the inside pages. Spilling coffee on it was also recommended.
Now, she said, you have the kind of notebook where you can write anything you want in it and you won’t care that there is nothing profound, memorable or necessarily interesting about the writing. You can actually make a real start as a writer with this kind of a notebook.
With that in mind, here then, is my first blog. Subject areas for future entries will be music, natural healthcare, yoga, more successful and happier living, ageing parents, adult children and the somewhat offbeat life that my wife Bonnett Chandler and I share with the rest of our flock, (2 cockatiels and a parakeet), Igor, Bela and Mason.
“I shall be so brief that I have already finished.”
- Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
PS More quirky quotes, a few pictures and a very brief bio. of Salvador Dali here: http://famousquoteshomepage.com/Art_Quotes_Artist_Quotes.htm
© February 28, 2008 Richard Chandler
