Sept. 2: Monday morning inspiration: Just write

Day 2: Challenge update: Soon after I posted yesterday, dear friend Jen texted me: "Hey, let's blog challenge together." Apparently I'm not the only one feeling the need for a little blogging boost... This morning, our mutual friend Sunshine also posted that she has undertaken a challenge for the month of September. Obviously the back-to-school mentality is alive and well in the moms of my world; fresh starts, new ideas, challenges! (More on that tomorrow.)

As Jen noted in her first post, if you would like to join in, just message me and I'll send you our list of prompts. The more the merrier! One of things I'm most interested in seeing is how Jen and I (and you?) approach the same prompt. Can't wait to see how it goes.

Monday mornings usually mean inspiration for me (even if it's a holiday morning around here): what will help me make this week the best it can be, and how can I plug into the inspiration around me to accomplish that? In that vein, this morning I am looking for inspiration in writing, from writers.

This piece with writers having written advice on their hands is amusing if not necessarily new or particularly insightful. My favorite is this one, I think because it's a bit brutal, but honest:

I recently saw this beautiful passage by the lovely writer Adrienne Rich below; the last sentence fairly sings to me.

An honorable human relationship—that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”—is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

I've never thought about the concept of writers not writing for a full year--to give the rest of us a chance to catch up on information overload--but now that he's mentioned it, I kind of like it. (Usually I just think I need to find better filters for the information I really want to take in, and carve out more time for reading.) How's this for a horrifying stat: "...according to the New York Times, 81% of Americans feel they have a book in them." What a hoot. Imagine how many of them you'd really want to read?

How do you know if something is really worth your while--are you someone who stays with a book or even a longform article to the end, or do you bail if it's not doing it for you? I used to be the former, I am now someone who will give a book a fair shake and then let it go; too many good books in the world to waste time on ones I'm not engrossed by.

Where do you find inspiration for writing--or reading?