Letters to a Young Poet

My first agent gave me a copy of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (thank you, Xandra) and over the years I have found it to be the perfect primer.  It doesn't cover the nuts and bolts of getting published or the technicalities of structure, but it is a wonderful meditation on how to live receptively, to tune in to your surroundings and your own experience, in order to be able to write sensitively, accurately and to the best of your ability.

At one point, Rilke says, "Why should you want to exclude any anxiety, any grief, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what it is that these conditions are accomplishing in you?" Astute guidance for ordinary living, but indispensable advice for a writer, both in terms of the process of writing, which can indeed be fraught with anxiety, grief and melancholy, but also in terms of the subject matter you may want to choose -- sorrow is a great catalyst for change, which is in turn the fulcrum of good fiction.

Apart from zooming over to Amazon (or better still your local independent bookshop!) to lay your hands on a copy of the Letters, try writing about a testing episode from your own life, either as a piece of autobiography, or as the preparatory work for a story.  See if you can achieve critical distance from what happened without losing any emotional intensity.  It's that rubbing your tummy while patting your head thing and when it boils down to it, that's what writing is mostly about.

Have a very Happy Easter...

and here's a seasonal door with St George strutting his stuff to add to the sum of your happiness.