My many weaknesses are starting to show their heads. I simply must get this thing out of my system. I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people. I wish I were.
        - John Steinbeck, written in his journal August 16, 1938, when he was writing Grapes of Wrath. As quoted in his memoir Working Days.

Much of what is termed “writer’s block” is an artist unable to overcome his or her insecurities, his or her fear of how the work will be received. Is my work good enough? Am I good enough? The artist is paid, or not paid, as the case may be, to overcome those fears and work. Put it out there. Let it make its own way in life. Let the consequences be what they may.

The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity. 
- Anne Truitt, sculptor, from Daybook: Journal Of An Artist

I have never wanted to be anybody else in my life.  Even when I have absolutely nothing to say.  Who gives a fuck about this shit I am writing?  And I think about that plenty, but I don't think anybody else has any more to say. 
       There are times when I have an utter failure of confidence, and I just think I can't imagine why anybody would want to read this shit, but the converse is also not true -- that I think that other people have the answers. 
       - Doug Peacock, author, from my 1993 Heron Dance interview.

I lose my confidence sometimes, and that's where the courage part comes in. I'm only halfway self-confident. . . If you have determination, you're going to use that determination to take the place of confidence.

      I was always willing to undergo hardship or whatever it took to be able to stay with my work. I could have quit many times -- given up, because it is no great art in life to be poor and hungry, and that's what I was.
     - Erskine Caldwell, novelist, author of Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, as well as a number of other books. Despite rejection and even scorn early in his writing career, his books ultimately went on to sell tens of millions of copies.

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Below, the two-page spread of this entry from the upcoming Heron Dance book on living and working as a creative outsider, Sing Us The Song Only You Can Sing.
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