Advice we can use

If it's good enough for the Hallmark flunkies ... it should be good advice for the creative minds of PEP.

NPR excerpts Ted Kooser's Poetry Home Repair Manual in this piece. The U.S. poet laureate is traveling the nation, talking to professionals and laypeople about the word -- and how words go, and don't go, together. The style reminds me of a book from college called "On Writing Well" which I have as one of the few reference books on my desk (along with my style guide, an old dictionary and thesaurus and my NPC guide book) -- more for highlighted inspiration than anything else.

"Sure, there are plenty of days when nothing good happens, days when every word you write seems silly and shallow, when your revisions seem to be dragging your poems in the wrong direction. But you need to be there writing and waiting, as a hunter might say, for that hour when at last the ducks come flying in. To say it more simply, in the words of a painter friend, you just need to "show up for work.""

That's what I am trying to do every day -- show up and start to make something of these ideas spilling out around me.