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Description
With rejection and intense commitment such integral parts of the writing life, many struggle to stay with the creative process. Combining explorations of perseverance, intention, riding through failure, and meaning-making with bringing oneself fully into one's art, Stay With It offers writers practices to sustain their writing and their creative life. Through a hybrid of craft, pedagogy, memoir and personal essay that call upon reflective exercises and prompts, Cindy Shearer helps writers understand themselves as artists as well as the nature of writing as an artistic process and practice. Drawing on knowledge from art forms beyond writing, from dancing to visual art, this book shows writers how to:
- Develop their own tools for sustaining their practice that are adaptable and unique to them
- See rules as opportunities and that there is no right or required process
- Recognize failure as a way to probe what they really want as writers
- Ask questions to understand their markets and create sustainable processes based on external drivers
- Discern their true goals focused around what they truly want to create.
Moving, illuminating and inspiring, Stay With It will help writers discover and claim a process they can rely on for support again and again.
Table of Contents
Part One: Works in Progress, Writing Lessons
Chapter One
· Stay With It: The Art of Being (Revisited) or Learning to Write by Dance
· Reflection
· Prompt
Chapter Two
· Elliot: Found and Loss: An Essay on Seeing, Failure, Imagining, Death, and Mentorship
· Reflection
· Prompt
Chapter Three
· It is Okay to Quit or How to Stop Writing and Become a Writer, An Essay in Four Parts
· Reflection
· Prompt
Chapter Four
· What is Creative Writing? A Personal Essay in Two Parts: Writing as Visual Art and My Life in Baseball: An Aesthetic of Creative Writing
· Reflection
· Prompt
Chapter Five
· Memory Boxes: A Collage Essay on The Writing Process
· Reflection
· Prompt
Part 2: Tools and Choices
Chapter One: Work in Progress, Choices, and Decisions
Sections:
· In process: What am I doing? How am I relating?
· What are you ready to create? Writing is Developmental
· Section Three: Writing or Bookmaking? When am I in process, when am I constructing work?
Chapter Two: Sustainable Practices
Sections:
· Writing is Real and That Makes it Hard (Maybe): Reflecting on what you have to say-in a work? In your body of work?
· Inquiry + Meaning Making = You Decide
· A Writer's Work, A Writer's Life: An Interrelationship
· Listening (or Not) To What Others Say: Coaching Yourself and Being Coached
Chapter Three: Tools You Can Rely on: An Introduction
Sections:
· Six Unexpected Tools: Relationship, Play, Translation, Being at Home, Mending, Seeing
· Failure is a Tool. Please use it.
Part 3: Saying Yes to A Sustainable Process
Sections:
· Looking for Lessons: A Path to Your Process
· Making a Toolbox
· Writing is an Ally
· Defining Your Work. Who and What Informs Your Writing?
· Your Sustainable Practices: Adding to Your Resources
Bibliography
Index
Product details
| Published | 11 Dec 2025 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (PDF) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 144 |
| ISBN | 9781350455467 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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