"Holly Lisle - Mugging The Muse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

That is a question that only you can answer ... and you'll have to answer it again every
time you pay.

But before you walk away, consider this: If writing is your hunger and your thirst,
and if you choose not to follow your dream because you're afraid, you'll pay a price
for that, too тАУ you'll pay with the progressive deadening of your soul, as time and
your own disillusionment with yourself eat away at who you are. One day you'll wake
up and discover that the part of yourself that knew how to dream тАУ and how to fly тАУ
has died, and that you are forever after bound to the ground, with only the memory
that you once had wings.

Every dreamer pays a price. But so does everyone who fears to dream.




HOLLY LISLE
 MUGGING THE MUSE: WRITING FICTION FOR LOVE AND MONEY 21




Finding Silence
We who write or aspire to write make much of place. A place to work, a room of our
own, an office, a nice quiet spot at a corner diner where the waitresses know not to
ask how we're doing if the pen is moving ... a place in the world to call mine. We
claim this space in the name of writing, and guard it jealously, because space set
aside acts to validate our dreams, and reminds us of the promise we have made to
ourselves тАУ the promise to write. When we are in our space and writing, spouses need
not visit, friends dare not call, children had better be bleeding or the house burning
down before they interrupt. I have a place, and I love it. My office is half of a balcony
over the living room, a big desk, a computer and a comfortable typing chair with a
firm back. The desk itself makes up a sort of fourth wall, and it is sufficient to give
me privacy and a sense that what I do is important enough to warrant space.
Place matters. I hate to think of writing again without it. I've done it before, it wasn't
fun, I got away from it as soon as I could and have done everything in my power
since to keep from sitting in the living room in the middle of mayhem. But place only
matters if we also have the silence to make use of it. And silence is harder to find.

I'm not talking about the sort of silence you get when the kids are at school and the
spouse is at work and the phone is set to take messages at the first ring. That sort of
silence is fine, but not essential to work. I've worked in the middle of a convention
with thousands of people streaming past me on either side, all talking loudly тАУ I knew
they were there, but I didn't hear them. And on many occasions I've tried to work in
an empty, quiet house, and found that the noise in my mind made productive thought
impossible.
The silence I'm talking about, the silence we as writers must have to be productive, is
silence inside ourselves. That silence travels anywhere. We carry it with us as if it
were a private retreat in the mountains nestled next to a crystalline, ice-cold lake,