In his book On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, Friedrich Schiller made a distinction between ‘naive’ and ‘sentimental’ poets. Schiller’s categorization is not about the poetry itself, the themes within the poems, or the content, but about the poets themselves. He views them as contrasting personalities who represent two opposing sides of creativity like Kant’s antinomies. If you’ve heard this before, you’ll…
Tag: First thoughts
How to plan a novel.
I’m writing this post because an About Writing subscriber got in touch to request more detail on how to plan a novel. In this post, I’ll talk about my experience. In next week’s, I’ll provide a step-by-step plan that some other writers follow. The creative stereotype sometimes pigeonholes us as whimsical hedonists living from one…
Natalie Goldberg’s First Thoughts.
In a previous post, What you must know before you start writing, I mentioned Natalie Goldberg’s First Thoughts writing experiment from Writing Down the Bones. I wrote about it as an opportunity to give your imagination the chance to surprise you, as a way to overcome writer’s block. And I explored the idea of incorporating the…
What you must know before you start writing.
Nothing. You don’t need to know anything more than you already know. Start writing. You don’t need to overthink your ideas. You don’t even need to know your ideas. If you want to, go ahead, but you don’t need to. You can meet your ideas as your letters meet the page. Decide whether it’s a…