If you want to write

    One of my favorite books on creativity is called "If you want to Write" by writer/teacher Brenda Ueland.  I'm returning to it again in snippets, trying not to underline every sentence, telling myself I own the whole book and can read any of it wheneeeevvvvver I want to.

    In the beginning she talks about Van Gogh and his simple, poignant letters on art to his younger brother.  Here are some quotes from those letters:

    "My only anxiety is what I can do...could I not be of use and good for something?...And in a picture I wish to say something that would console as music does."

     "The world only concerns me in so far as I feel a certain debt and duty towards it and out of gratitude want to leave some souvenir in the shape of drawings or pictures, not to please a certain tendancy in art but to express sincere human feeling."

     Brenda writes further of Van Gogh," He loved something - say the sky.  He loved human beings.  He wanted to show human beings how beautiful the sky was.  So he painted it for them. And that was all there was to it."   And this, " By painting the sky, Van Gogh was really able to see it and adore it better than if he had just looked at it.  In the same way, as I would tell my class, you will never know what your husband looks like unless you try to draw him, and you will never understand him unless you try to write his story."