Decided on my New Year intention already!

This is the year I live more deliberately. I’m sick of rushing. I’m banning it in from my life. I want pauses. I want time. I want deliberation. I don’t want to rush writing, but I don’t want to rush anything else I do either – sewing, cooking, knitting – even planning. I want it all to be conducted with calm, measured thoughts and actions.

A pipe dream?

I don’t think it has to be, particularly not with the kind of work I do. Sure, I can make an exception for a client if the job has to be done within a certain time-frame and I’m happy to do that. But apart from emergency editing, I’m having a more considered year.

I’m happy to work on something until it’s as perfect as I can make it.

Enjoy the process – not just the product.

And I leave you with a quote gleaned from Surviving the Writer’s Life by the late Suzanne Lipsett. (This is a book I’ve read cover to cover and can heartily recommend.)

…I began to understand certain truths that I work by now:

• that one’s creative process is as unique as one’s fingerprints;
• that in practicing one’s art, the writer explores and becomes acquainted with that process and finds ways to adapt it to life’s contingencies – which means, when available time is short, writing short books;
• that the more writers understand their own process, the more fully they can trust it, the more profound is the pleasure, and the more mature the results….

Writing is a lifelong journey, a slow revealing and minute exploration. Once begun, there will be the stalls and grinding uphill pushes that any ride entails. But there will also be those inevitable glides – through terrains dark and frightening or flooded with sunlight, it doesn’t matter – that bring joy to the traveler and stoke the desire that fuels the creative engine.  (pp. 139 – 140)