The idea of being teachable relates to humility. You submit to another, be it the author you’re reading, the employer you serve, or the professor teaching the class. You open yourself to criticism and new ways of looking at things.
How to Overcome Discouragement
A writer is not a writer because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, or because everything she does is golden. A writer is a writer because, even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. — Junot Diaz
How to be Patient in the Gap
To be an artist means not to compute or count; it means to ripen as the tree, which does not force its sap, but stand unshaken in the storms of spring with no fear that summer might not follow. It will come regardless. But it comes only to those who live as though eternity stretches before them, carefree, silent, and endless. I learn it daily, learn it with many pains, for which I am grateful: Patience is all!
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, “The Third Letter”
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Writing as Healing
Writing can be a true spiritual discipline. Writing can help us to concentrate, to get in touch with the deeper stirrings of our hearts, to clarify our minds, to process confusing emotions, to reflect on our experiences, to give artistic expression to what we are living, and to store significant events in our memories…By writing we can claim what we have lived and thus integrate it more fully into our journeys. Then writing can become lifesaving for us and sometimes for others, too.
— Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey, “Writing to Save the Day”
How to Handle Anger and Frustration
The creative life isn’t an easy one. You seek to translate the ideas in the head into words or art on the page. Sometimes, the ideas become realities. Other times, the ideas turn into something more wondrous than anything you could ever have imagined. You stand back, wondering, grateful. Many times, though, the ideas crash against the page and burn. The words don’t come. Everything comes up stick figures. You find yourself angry and frustrated—with the work, with yourself.