Tuesday's Inspiration - Courage To Create - Rollo May #MFRWauthor #Aminspired

While looking through past posts I came upon this from 2010 and realized what I said then remains true today. Writing takes enough courage to be alone, to imagine the lives of your characters, to live in their world and telling their stories.

Rollo May wrote a book in 1977 called "The Courage to Create." I found it on one of my book shelves and pulled it out thinking that it could be a good jump off for writing about things that inspire. The book is geared to all those in the creative art sector but for me writing is where it's at. What surprised me is how I underlined passages and wrote in the margins little notes about my own creative process. This was read during a time when I was exploring all the facets of where I was headed in writing. Short stories, poetry, novels and sort of why I wanted to write.

I have many friends who write and I have friends who have written and who have given it up. Are they on hiatus while ideas are germinating. I'd like to think so, but I fear many of them have lost the courage to create.

Writing is a solitary business and yet it's one peopled with people and places we want to know or to visit. So exactly what is courage?

To me courage for the writer is the ability to get past the fear that there's nothing new to say. Most stories have been told before, but each person tells the story in a different fashion with different people and different places. Courage is doing when one is afraid, when one looks at despair and reaches for the distant stars.

Courage requires a knowing of one's self. Courage isn't rash, Courage is allowing the seeds inside to blossom. Do you have the courage to create?