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.

Autorentext
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.

Inhalt

Introduction: How to Read this Book and Why

Part One: Works in Progress, Writing Lessons

Chapter One
· Stay With It: The Art of Being (Revisited) or Learning to Write by Dance
· Reflection
· Prompt

Chapter Two
· Elliot: Found and Loss: An Essay on Seeing, Failure, Imagining, Death, and Mentorship
· Reflection
· Prompt

Chapter Three
· It is Okay to Quit or How to Stop Writing and Become a Writer, An Essay in Four Parts
· Reflection
· Prompt

Chapter Four
· What is Creative Writing? A Personal Essay in Two Parts: Writing as Visual Art and My Life in Baseball: An Aesthetic of Creative Writing
· Reflection
· Prompt

Chapter Five
· Memory Boxes: A Collage Essay on The Writing Process
· Reflection
· Prompt

Part 2: Tools and Choices
Chapter One: Work in Progress, Choices, and Decisions
Sections:
· In process: What am I doing? How am I relating?
· What are you ready to create? Writing is Developmental
· Section Three: Writing or Bookmaking? When am I in process, when am I constructing work?

Chapter Two: Sustainable Practices
Sections:
· Writing is Real and That Makes it Hard (Maybe): Reflecting on what you have to say-in a work? In your body of work?
· Inquiry + Meaning Making = You Decide
· A Writer's Work, A Writer's Life: An Interrelationship
· Listening (or Not) To What Others Say: Coaching Yourself and Being Coached

Chapter Three: Tools You Can Rely on: An Introduction
Sections:
· Six Unexpected Tools: Relationship, Play, Translation, Being at Home, Mending, Seeing
· Failure is a Tool. Please use it.

Part 3: Saying Yes to A Sustainable Process
Sections:
· Looking for Lessons: A Path to Your Process
· Making a Toolbox
· Writing is an Ally
· Defining Your Work. Who and What Informs Your Writing?
· Your Sustainable Practices: Adding to Your Resources

Bibliography

Index