• Café Life is the Colony's main hangout, watering hole and meeting point.

    This is a place where you'll meet and make writing friends, and indulge in stratospherically-elevated wit or barometrically low humour.

    Some Colonists pop in religiously every day before or after work. Others we see here less regularly, but all are equally welcome. Two important grounds rules…

    • Don't give offence
    • Don't take offence

    We now allow political discussion, but strongly suggest it takes place in the Steam Room, which is a private sub-forum within Café Life. It’s only accessible to Full Members.

    You can dismiss this notice by clicking the "x" box

Inspired or intimidated?

Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.
Status
Not open for further replies.
Joined
Nov 28, 2018
Location
Wrexham
LitBits
0
Sometimes I read the works of great writers and I'm awed by their pure skill. I stumbled across this poem of Yeats' (I really should read more poetry!) and it really struck me:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.


As a reader, I love the poem and as a writer, I'm inspired to write, but at the same time, intimated by the thought that I'll never write anything as good as this.

How do you feel when you read something that fills you with awe? Inspired or intimidated?
 
Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.
Definitely inspired. Three weeks ago I set out on a new novel, set in 1575. I sat looking at a blank screen for a while, too afraid to make the first step. So instead I made a cup of tea and read the first five pages of Wolf Hall, absorbing the amazing rhythm and vivid language, and that gave me enough momentum to get myself going (not that I'll ever write anything as good as Wolf Hall, of course, but its always better to be inspired than afraid!)
 
If I read something inspiring in a crime novel, perhaps where the author describes landscape in a way that makes it a character in the story or shows some universal truth about what it means to be human through the internal dialogue of the protagonist, I feel encouraged that I'm on the right track with my writing. I want to produce a response in the reader, making them think about things differently—to go beneath the surface of the action.
 
Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.
I agree with @Rich. It's both inspiring and intimidating. Sometimes I let the intimidation win, but only briefly, and then I think about how much I have to learn by reading excellent writers--they've left us these wonderful instruction manuals in the form of their stories (provided we can tear ourselves enough out of the story to analyse the writing itself to learn from it :) It's why I often read really good books more than once, because the first time I usually forget to analyse).
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest Articles By Litopians

  • Advertising and Social Media
    There has been much discussion in writing circles about how much a writer has to self-promote these ...
  • Future Abstract: Fights at Night
    SATIRE ALERT: The following abstract is entirely fictional and does not represent actual events or s ...
  • Great Novel Openings Quiz
    As writers, we all know how important it is to grip the reader from the very start. Intriguing, surp ...
  • In The Summertime
    In the early seventies, I had a semi-Afro hairstyle and a shaggy beard. . I thought I looked like th ...
  • Working with a Literary Agent
    The Querying In a previous post I mentioned that I was back in the query trenches. To recap, my earl ...
  • Danger! Danger!
    What is perhaps the most feared creature of the Borneo rainforest, I hear you ask? Who is the King o ...
  • The World Has Missed You
         May 2021… COVID lockdown restrictions had eased, so Mrs Treaclechops and I headed to the I ...
Back
Top