CHOOSING

I share your frustration Inez. I know that to write, and that is my passion, I must be alone, in a quiet place. I must try to penetrate what I really think and feel beneath and beyond my actions. What motivates me? What are my true beliefs and how are they colored by prejudices I think are fact?
Yet to make my writing communicate...and that, after all is the purpose of writing, I need to pull out of myself and connect with others. I need to experience and grapple with other mind-sets and know that their value is equal to my own.
I have found that I cannot map out each day in advance because if I say, "All right. Today, only writing. " or "Today, no phone calls." I miss that exhilarating and accidental moment when suddenly everything I have been groping to express becomes clear.
I think that this push-pull conflict of solitude vs. socialization is the writer's dilemma. Let me share what happened when I did not succumb to it. When I got out of the hospital, in my late thirties, I did nothing but write and paint. I thought it would be heaven, but indeed it was not. I wrote the same story with different characters every day. I painted the same picture with different colors every night. Oh, I THOUGHT they were different but their esssence was the same.
Perhaps a writer must nourish his talent much as he does a plant. It must be fed and it must be stimulated to grow new foliage. It cannot lie dormant in the same soil with no water or food. It will wither and die if it does.
I am not sure if this helps, Inez. I am not even sure that it is a correct assumption.
But for me as I fight to find time to write thoughtful meaningful prose or paint pictures that have more to say than the image on the canvas, this has helped me realize that every sentence I write is only the tip of my own personal iceberg. I must live fully to write completely. Only then will my prose SAY anything to someone else. And too, every finished painting is far more than the few hours it takes to place paint on a ground. It is the life I am living, the angers, the joys, the melding of my experiences into an artistic result.