“We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. ” 

~Joseph Campbell

What happens when your favourite character’s story completely changes? Does their perfect life begin to unravel or do their problems magically disappear? What do these changes do to their personalities, do they merely survive or thrive?

Get creative and have fun.

“Anyone moderately familiar with the rigors of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted people’s parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.” 

~ Virginia Woolf

“The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.”
~Alain Robbe-Grillet

No matter what creative challenges I face,
I know I can always work through them.

“There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.” ~John Steinbeck

One thing I have learned is that there is one constant in life and that is change. We all experience changes that occur by choice or by chance, they can be positive and enrich us, often, when thrust upon us; they knock us down and scare us to our core but ultimately, they change us by teaching us more about our strengths and ourselves.

Change can be difficult, but it is inevitable however, what matters the most, is how we face it. Are you in the midst of change? What positive lessons are rising to the surface? What would you like the outcome to be? What can you do to help yourself reach that outcome? How are you changing? Reflect and write.

“Out of the artist’s imagination, as out of nature’s inexhaustible well, pours one thing after another. The artist composes, writes, or paints just as he dreams, seizing whatever swims close to the net. This shimmering mess of loves and hates—fishing trips taken long ago with Uncle Ralph, a 1940 green Chevrolet, a war, a vague sense of what makes a novel, a symphony, a photograph—this is the clay the artist must shape into an object worthy of our attention; that is, our tears, our laughter, our thought.”

~John Gardner

“What is needed is,
in the end, simply this:
solitude, great inner solitude.
Going into yourself and
meeting no one for hours
on end–that is what you must
be able to attain.”

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I am blessed with a creative mind.

~Thomas Merton

Write about a time when you were completely lost in the moment. Was it creating a work of art, writing, reading, playing music or just being lost in a particular mood? Reflect and write!