By Carol Grannick on December 31, 2010
This will be my last post at The Irrepressible Writer for awhile or forever, although it won’t be my last commentary on creating and maintaining resilience for the writer’s journey.
My tri-yearly column continues at Illinois-SCBWI’s The Prairie Wind and I’ll happily guest post, put my two cents into conversations, and remain available for consultation via [...]
Posted in Learned Resilience: How To Do It, Lessons From Life, Rethinking Writing Obstacles | Tagged How to Stop Negative Thinking, Resilience Workshop
By Carol Grannick on December 23, 2010
This site at the Chicago Botanic Gardens made me think: are there are times as a writer when you might feel like you’re just barely hanging on? When the obstacles of the writing life seem overwhelming and almost – almost – more than you can bear? You’re at the edge of despair, but not willing to [...]
Posted in Learned Resilience: How To Do It, Lessons From Life | Tagged negative feelings
By Carol Grannick on November 25, 2010
This Thanksgiving week, I read two wonderful columns that talk about gratitude in different, yet linked ways.
For those of us who are always on the journey to create serious positivity, gratitude is considered to be a mainstay.
So here’s Mary Schmich from the Chicago Tribune and Robert Wright from the New York Times. They’ve both said [...]
Posted in Lessons From Life | Tagged gratitude
By Carol Grannick on November 18, 2010
I’m “re-visioning” a middle grade novel that is very close to my heart, and it’s feeling lovely. Of course I wish I could finish it quickly. Of course I know I shouldn’t, and can’t.
The other day on a visit to the Chicago Botanic Garden, the Zig-Zag Bridge joining the mainland to the Japanese Island validated [...]
Posted in Learned Resilience: How To Do It, Lessons From Life | Tagged revision, Transitions
By Carol Grannick on November 9, 2010
Speaking of transitions, which I did last week, every time you want to begin writing, you go through a mini-transition. For lots of writers, getting started each day can be hard.
Do you ever feel like you need a forklift to hoist yourself into your writing “place”?
Meredith Resnick of the Writers Inner Journey, talks about moving [...]
Posted in Learned Resilience: How To Do It, Lessons From Life | Tagged Writers' transitions
By Carol Grannick on November 4, 2010
I’ve blogged here about how transitions can be difficult periods.
Still, they’re not fun, so I keep forgetting that I always seem to need them.
Take my current transition between planning a revision and actually beginning the writing. It was like starting an old, faithful car in a Chicago winter that had been standing unused for a [...]
Posted in Learned Resilience: How To Do It, Lessons From Life | Tagged Transitions, Writing
By Carol Grannick on October 28, 2010
Sometimes you have to trade one kind of positivity to get even more of another.
In the writing life, that can mean putting aside a manuscript you’d love to keep working on because you’ll have a fresher, probably stronger, perspective for the “re-visioning” to come.
In the first years of writing for children I didn’t have [...]
Posted in Lessons From Life, Rethinking Writing Obstacles | Tagged positivity, positivity for writers
By Carol Grannick on October 20, 2010
I’m in the rhythm of a changing season, the cycle of the moon, the ebb and flow of life.
It’s been almost a year since I created The Irrepressible Writer, a site to help writers build and maintain psychological resilience. In the past couple of months I’ve wondered if I have much left to say, since [...]
Posted in Learned Resilience: How To Do It, Lessons From Life | Tagged positivity, writers' resilience
By Carol Grannick on October 6, 2010
Last weekend I had a long, mutually empathic conversation with a visual artist friend. She said, and I agreed, that it felt good to talk with someone who didn’t ask, “So have you sold anything yet?”
I told her about my Michelangelo’s Advice blog post, and the experience of walking down the hallway of the Accademia [...]
Posted in Learned Resilience: How To Do It, Lessons From Life | Tagged writers' resilience
By Carol Grannick on September 30, 2010
In Florence my husband and I often sat on one of the stone benches framing the Piazza del Duomo in the late afternoon and early evening, after whatever intense experience we’d had during the day and before (and after) our pre-dinner naps. We began this ritual because of the very real physical and emotional need for [...]
Posted in Lessons From Life | Tagged Transitions, Writing
