Neha's Notebook

It is my contention that is order to Keep a Muse, you must first offer food. How can you feed something that isn’t yet there is a little hard to explain… The fact is simple enough. Throughout a lifetime by ingesting food and water, we build cells, we grow, we become larger, and more substantial. That which was not, is. The process is undetectable. It can be viewed only as intervals along the way. We know it is happening, but we don’t quite know, how or why. Similarly, in a lifetime, we stuff ourselves with sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and textures of people, animals, landscapes, events, large and small. We stuff ourselves with these impressions and experiences and our reaction to them. Into our subconscious go not only factual data but reactive data, our movement toward or away from the sensed events. These are the stuffs, the foods, on which The Muse grows. This is the storehouse, the file, to which we must return every waking hour to check reality against memory, and in sleep ...

  Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. Observe almost any survival creature, you see the same. Jump, run, freeze. In the ability to flick like an eyelash, crack like a whip, vanish like steam, here this instant, gone the next – life teems on earth. In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping. Run fast, leap up, turn on the light, but whatever you do, don’t look up. If you look up before you get the light on, it will be there. The Thing. The terrible Thing waiting at the top of the stairs. So run, blind; don’t look.

Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet if I were asked about the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he wants to go, I could only warn him to look at his zest, see to his gusto. If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. For the first thing a writer should be is - excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. • Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain. But on the way in your work, why not carry those two inflated pig bladders labeled zest and gusto.

when you drink the well water in the summer it seems cool and when you drink the same water in the winter it seems warm. Even though it’s the same water, at the same 18 degrees according to the thermometer, the way it seems depends on whether it’s summer or winter. At present, the world seems complicated and mysterious to you, but if you change, the world will appear more simple. The issue is not about how the world is, but about how you are.