Writing:Keep Plugging Away

I have not been able to communicate with Joel or Paul or any of the others from my prison writing groups because my supervised release order forbids any contact with known felons. If I can get my order modified I will be checking on them - hoping that they have kept writing. I quit for a long time and I see now it was a mistake on many levels. I am trying to get KH to write as pay back for him supporting me. Now for final encouragement to old friends or complete strangers I am quoting from Vauhini Vara on Keeping a Long Writing Project Alive:

Years ago, when I was in college, at Stanford — and starting to figure out that I wanted to be a writer — some friends and I got to take a creative-writing class with the writer Tobias Wolff, who had taught for years at Stanford and, before that, at Syracuse (where George Saunders was his student). Toward the end of the quarter, he did a kind of Q&A session, and I asked him what differentiated the writers he’d worked with who had gone on to publish books from those who hadn’t. His answer struck me, at the time, as completely unsatisfying: the ones who published books, he said, were the ones who just kept working on it, long after everyone else had given up. Write, write, write. There’s not much magic to it, but, eventually, it works.

 Please do not give up. Keep working. Keep trying to fo better. Be creative in the face of a universe that wants to destroy.

sch 5/7/22