Last Updated on 17/08/2022
Written by Theodore Deppe, a poet. He also worked as a nurse in psychiatric hospitals.
- Begin with surprise, compress the narrative, make time for the lyric.
- Pay attention to the liminal space between dreaming and waking.
- Value the real questions more than the apparent answers.
- Prefer self-discovery to self-expression.
- Find the right balance between daily routines and the gifts of the unexpected.
- Take to the road and be at home everywhere.
- Walk whenever possible rather than pass by things in a moving vehicle.
- Plan, but do not over-plan.
- Pay attention to what’s most urgent inside you and then play with it, work with it, follow it where it must go.
- Fall in love with as many types of theatre, books, music, art, dance, and all the rest as possible.
- Love the everyday and the overlooked.
- Try not to be afraid of “the beautiful lightning”.
- Be part of a conversation that goes on over the centuries as to what good writing is, and about who we might be as human beings.
- Write about what resists explanation.
- Follow the road with the most energy.
- Listen to the scraps of conversation as people walk past you.
- Try to get eight hours of sleep each night.
- Be ready to stay up till morning when you find yourself inside a poem.
- Spend time at the gates of the unexplainable.
- Reread Dostoevsky and Elizabeth Bishop every ten years so they can speak to what is changing in you.
- Sense when a scene has peaked and stop there.
- Sense when an ending is coming too soon and stay open for a better one.
- Live the life you have been given to live, so you will not regret it later.
- Pay attention to those moments when your emotions seem inappropriate. Why do you want to laugh when the occasion seems sorrowful?
- Make sufficient time each day for your art. What lasts must come first.
- Don’t over explain.
- Write about what you love, and what you will lose, with as much passion and honesty as you can.
- Spend less time online.
- Spend more time reading great literature than you do reading the day’s news.
- Fail at all of this. Fail again. Then, as Samuel Beckett put it, fail better. Be grateful.