In Impro, Keith Johnstone describes how his teachers taught him to write, “They wanted me to reject and discriminate, believing that the best artist was the one who made the most elegant choices. They analysed poems to show how difficult ‘real’ writing was, and they taught that I should always know where the writing was taking me, and that I should search for better and better ideas. They spoke as if an image like ‘the multitudinous seas incarnadine’ could have been worked out like the clue to a crossword puzzle. Their idea of the ‘correct’ choice was the one anyone would have made if he had thought long enough.”

These assumptions sounded all too familiar to me. I enjoy writing here every day, and I have a lot of fun doing it—but this is not a point of pride. 

Serious writers bleed on the page, serious writers like having written, serious writers polish and infuse style into every sentence and particularly their introductions. A part of me believed that what I was doing here was, clearly, not something a serious writer should be doing.

Keith continues, “I now feel that imagining should be as effortless as perceiving.” I wouldn’t call writing at this blog effortless. But it is a practice, and even though I get a lot of joy out of it, I take it very seriously.