Today, just this from Anais Nin on the connect between emotion and writing:
“You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications.
“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
Nin wrote this letter (published in the fourth volume of her work) to a seventeen-year-old aspiring author by the name of Leonard W, whom she’d taken under wing as creative mentor.
I take from this, simply: loneliness and pain has a purpose. What do you take?
