Monday

Am I letting time slip by? Should I be pushing myself to do more? Or does creativity need dips - pauses? Sometimes if I do force myself to write, I will enjoy it and produce something satisfying. At other times I can nail myself down (as one of my friends puts it) and nothing comes and I feel a failure. Yet I won't know until I try. And my process seems to require a lot of musing, along with many breaks. I wonder if this is laziness, procrastination or necessary? It's a funny, slippery quirk, this thing I call creativity.

Titles have been exercising me this week. It came up at a get together I had with a couple of writer companions. How to choose a title for a poem, to say just enough but not too much. And then Daniel Stern dedicates a whole section to how he came up with the title for his book The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (WW Norton & Co, New York, London, 2004). Personally I think he made a mistake in not sticking with his first thought, "A World in a Grain of Sand". This would also have gone perfectly with the cover illustration, sand sifting through an hour glass (though, presumably, the cover was the last thing to be decided on).

I wanted to give a title to the small research project I have embarked on, but found myself stumped. It is looking at the writing journey - an over-used phrase and title if ever there was one - and is bringing out themes around potential swamped and then re-discovered. Re-surfacing has come to mind, but could indicate a treatise on tarmac, whereas Surfacing, I'm fairly sure, has been used for a novel, perhaps by Margaret Atwood.

I have had better luck finding a title for the series of novels which I'm pretending I am not writing: The Art of... The Art of Surviving I have already, and I am starting on The Art of Leaving. The possibilities are endless, which I guess is what Sue Grafton thought when she started on her A is for... crime series.