To write, or not to write: okay, let's just cut to the chase--why we must write because the alternative is just too dang scary...

A few nights ago, I was at a poetry reading at a nearby liberal arts college, where several local poets read from a new book of poems about Alabama.

One of the readers, a creative writing teacher at the college, made a comment about how he teaches his students that writing should be approached as work, that you have to write every day and can’t sit around and wait for inspiration to hit.

That reminded me of a conversation I’ve been having with my assistant at my day job, who has been telling me the same thing lately about my own poetry writing patterns, and while, like most people, I don’t always practice what I preach, I can say that the act of writing is the best way I know of to generate ideas.

When you approach a blank page or screen, the best way to put something on it is to simply write something on it, anything, simply freewrite with no regard to what you’re writing, just your pen or keyboard silently babbling until your thoughts and words begin to take shape.

Yet, as I was pondering all of this, and how my own thinking-out-loud will affect my writing process from here on out, for some reason I just can’t get an old Monty Python sketch on this same subject out of my mind. So, please enjoy this MP3 of Monty Python’s brilliant application of sports casting to Thomas Hardy’s writing of Return of the Native: Novel Writing (Live from Wessex). (For a transcript, click here.)