Stay With Writing

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.

Cindy Shearer is the founder and program chair for the writing MFA program at California Institute of Integral Studies, USA. She is the author of Ten Not So Tangible Tools For Writers, a work of text and image developed in the early 2000s and published Mission at Tenth, the MFA writing/arts journal. She has served as co-producer of the podcasts Artifact and Meaning Making.

List of Figures Author Bio Acknowledgements Introduction: Start there, why not? Chapter One: Elliott: Loss and Found I: Found-A Way to See II: Drastic Recounting: A Triptych of Loss and Not Found III: Found: Imagining IV: Found and Loss, Not Quite Found Resources Reflections and Exercises Chapter Two: Why I Quit Writing and How I Found A New Art Form I: Finding a Form: Postcards II: In Relationship and A Puzzle III: Offering (and Green Tara): Where are you? IV: Story Boxes-Imagining V. Writing is Art, Lost and Found VI: Works in Progress: Writing in Image Resources Reflections and Exercises Chapter Three: Stay With It Memory Boxes in Words Box 1: Staying with it: Possibility Box 2: Practice Box 3: Staying Curious: Play Box 4: Place/Peace Box 5: Vantage Point/Perspective Resources Reflection and Exercises Chapter Four: The Circuitous but Sustainable Writer's Life Writing is Word and Image Working Together Curiosity and a Final Exercise Your Writing Tools: Next Steps Final Postcard From Loss to Lease Resources References Index