Plath’s journals helped her with structure and with writing The Bell Jar, her semi-autobiographical novel. Nothing like my teenage journals of high school drama and things my mother wouldn’t let me do). She recorded her thoughts, feelings and actions (rendered beautifully, I might add. She started journaling during her adolescence and it eventually grew to a kind of obsession. However, she did keep a journal for most of her life, which is now available for us to read.ĭespite having published her first poem at eight years old, one could argue that her development as a writer grew the most due to her diligent journal keeping. Sylvia Plath rarely spoke about her own craft publicly as she was incredibly self-analytical. Next time you are in a creative slump, try going to the gym, working out at home, or going for a brisk walk. Then for addition and variety, I launch forth in my vocalism shout declamatory pieces, sentiments, sorrow, anger, &c., from the stock poets or plays - or inflate my lungs and sing the wild tunes and refrains I heard of the blacks down south, or patriotic songs I learn’d in the army. After I wrestle with the tree awhile, I can feel its young sap and virtue welling up out of the ground and tingling through me from crown to toe, like health’s wine. “A solitary and pleasant sundown hour at the pond, exercising arms, chest, my whole body, by a tough oak sapling thick as my wrist, twelve feet high-pulling and pushing, inspiring the good air. In an entry from the winter of 1877, still recovering from the paralytic stroke that had left him severely disabled five years earlier, the sixty-six-year-old poet describes his workout in the gymnasium of the wilderness: In his collection, Specimen Days, he writes about working out and taking care of oneself physically as part of the spiritual and creative connection to the body. He was awakened to the relationship of the body and spirit more fully after his experience as a volunteer nurse in the Civil War. Walt Whitman was fascinated with the mind-body connection-the question of whether we are bodies in minds, or minds in bodies-a concept that interested philosophers for years. Sometimes I hear the dissonance then I try to straighten it out in the morning.” I don’t invite comments from anyone but my editor, but hearing it aloud is good. Maybe after dinner, I’ll read to him what I’ve written that day. We have a drink together and have dinner. I shower, prepare dinner so that when my husband comes home, I’m not totally absorbed in my work. When I come home at 2, I read over what I’ve written that day, and then try to put it out of my mind. If it’s going well, I’ll stay as long as it’s going well. If the work is going badly, I stay until 12:30. I try to get there around 7, and I work until 2 in the afternoon. I keep a dictionary, a Bible, a deck of cards and a bottle of sherry in the room. I keep a hotel room in which I do my work-a tiny, mean room with just a bed, and sometimes if I can find it, a face basin. He goes off to his work around 6:30, and I go off to mine. “I usually get up at about 5:30, and I’m ready to have coffee by 6, usually with my husband. It’s important, as writers, to value your writing time as just as crucial as if you are going to a traditional job. I like how she acknowledges her time writing as going to work, just like her husband. In the book, Daily Rituals (audiobook), Angelou describes her daily routine and schedule in detail from morning till night. Maya Angelou was a writer, poet, civil rights activist and award-winning author known for her acclaimed memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which made literary history as the first nonfiction best-seller by an African-American woman.
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