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Dizzy Zaba's avatar

Celine, thank you for this piece. I just published my first ever (!) fiction story in a literary magazine, and I was horrified that the piece they selected was the one that took the least amount of effort, pain, frustration to write. Really, THIS was the one they wanted to put out in the world? It could be so much better, and I has many others that *were* better! My source material was my dreams, and it felt like cheating, like I didn’t really write it. And in reading you and talking to some creative friends, I realize that it’s not that the story was effortless, it’s that I had spent my lifetime on my writing practice and this was one of the things that came out of alllllll of that work.

I really appreciate your thinking on this. And I especially appreciate how SPECIFIC and well-researched this entire piece was. I am bookmarking it and will for sure return to it several more times.

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Jesse's avatar

"My image of an artist in motion is one of the brows furrowed in concentration, lips pursed in judgement, and eyes anything but closed in the way it does during a smile. It is fully open, absorbing the world in front of it." (from an old piece)

Dissatisfaction is the gap between your desired state and your current state. Buddhists say: let go your desires, and you will be satisfied. But while it's meaningful to drop your desires, the struggle towards your wants is where meaning is created.

I really like this definition of the divine discontent, and think it can be also be a way to distinguish between desires that are worth letting go of and desires worth the discontent for.

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