Stay With Writing : Practices for Sustaining the Writer's Work and Life

With rejection and intense commitment such integral parts of the writing life, many struggle to stay with the creative process. Combining explorations of perseverance, intention, riding through failure, and meaning-making with bringing oneself fully into one’s art, Stay With It offers writers practices to sustain their writing and their creative life. Through a hybrid of craft, pedagogy, memoir and personal essay that call upon reflective exercises and prompts, Cindy Shearer helps writers understand themselves as artists as well as the nature of writing as an artistic process and practice. Drawing on knowledge from art forms beyond writing, from dancing to visual art, this book shows writers how to:- Develop their own tools for sustaining their practice that are adaptable and unique to them- See rules as opportunities and that there is no right or required process- Recognize failure as a way to probe what they really want as writers- Ask questions to understand their markets and create sustainable processes based on external drivers- Discern their true goals focused around what they truly want to create. Moving, illuminating and inspiring, Stay With It will help writers discover and claim a process they can rely on for support again and again.