At times I want to write and find my muse quiet. At times I have ideas but no talent. I am learning the solution: when struggling to write – read. I find that as I read newspaper articles, others blog posts, books (more and more non-fiction these days) ideas come to me. From somewhere deep in my brain nuggets of ideas from here, or there, from this source or that, bubble up and coalesce. Then often without real planning, I sit to capture the ideas and the threads that connect them and out flows (at last) a more or less coherent piece. It isn’t that I am borrowing other writer’s work (a friend ask if it wasn’t hard to be so moved by other writing that I actually more or less copied the author’s words or style). Instead, when reading I try to think beyond the words on the page to the connections in my own experience. I find inspiration not an example to follow.

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

-Mark Twain

What you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.

-Twila Tharp

I’m off to read.