Imaginative Empathy Is One Of The Great

I Can't Understand How People Can Settle For Having Just One Life. I Remember We Were In English Class And We Were Talking About That Poem By - That One Guy. David Frost. 'two Roads Diverged In A Yellow Wood-' You Know This Poem, Right? 'two Roads Diverged In A Yellow Wood, And Sorry I Could Not Travel Both And Be One Traveler, Long I Stood And Looked Down One As Far As I Could, To Where It Bent In The Undergrowth-" "i Loved That Poem. But I Remember Thinking To Myself: Why? How Come You Can't Travel Both? That Seemed Really Unfair To Me.

For The Last Few Years I've Tried To Force Myself To Write At Least One Page Every Day, Which Doesn't Sound Like Much But It's Actually Pretty Hard To Manage. Because I'm Not Allowed To Do A Make-up Day. I Can't Do Two Pages The Next Day. The Punishment For Not Completing My Page Is That I Have To Eat A Vegetarian Meal The Next Day.

I Never Could Figure Out How Those People Like Bukowski Could Be Both Carousers And Writers At The Same Time, Because To Me Writing Takes As Much Destructive Energy As It Takes To Be A Really Good Professional Drunk.

The Earliest Impetuses For Writing, For Me, Were Simply The Strange Things I Happened To Notice In My Everyday Life, Stuff I Read About In The Grocery Store Tabloids My Mom Bought, Situations That Struck Me As Compelling, Anecdotes I'd Heard, Images, Words, Metaphors.

Fiction Is A Particular Kind Of Rhetoric, A Way Of Thinking That I Think Can Be Useful In Your Life. It Asks You To Image The World Through Someone Else's Eyes, And It Allows You To Try To Empathize With Situations That You Haven't Actually Experienced.