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Releasing your own ideas into the outside world in the form of writing can be exhilarating, rewarding, fun, frustrating, slow or torture, depending on how you access and use your imagination, and where you expect to get your material.

I have learned that writers who have a strict process that they follow and recommend, are the ones I have the most trouble learning writing methods from, and find the least enjoyment in reading their finished work. To research, explore and learn all the facts first, before regurgitating info is great, if you're doing business or educational material. For creative writing to be successful to your own eyes and heart and for the reading pleasure of others, relying solely on research or trying to emulate another style of writing that you admire, is ridiculous. Structure is not always a good thing, especially when dealing with creations that are born out of thin air. Facts must be researched sometimes, even in the most outrageous fiction, but style and form of delivery must be original, your own personal spewings, to be valid and valuable. Harnessing ideas from thin air is a tricky game!

Great joy can be gleaned from this hobby, if practiced correctly. Ahem. As if I am such an expert. I think of the way I practice creative writing as follows: I am riding a huge, wild, black stallion across a field of wildflowers in the hot sun without knowing how to stop the horse. Even though terrified of what may lay ahead, not having any idea if I will make it in one piece, I still don't want to stop. The rush of fresh, hot air hits my face, and the pungent smell of the flowers and the wild horse smell fill my nose, and the heat of the sun burns my face and the trembling muscles of the wildly galloping horse alert my skin, the sound of the pounding hooves on the grassy dirt below and the horse's whistling breath as it races as fast as it can, and the bright sunlight and the blinding melee of colours of the huge expanse of wildflowers bursting onto my wide eyes, all of it is so overwhelming that I have no will of my own to stop, I just ride along and see, smell, hear, feel, experience, absorb...

Then when it is over I look back and say, "Wow, that was a ride." In other words, pardon the pun, "Wow, that was writing."

I am presently in the middle of reading a very inspirational,(for me, anyway), little book written by Ray Bradbury called "Zen in the Art of Writing". I won't quote from it or it would defeat the whole purpose of what he is trying to convey

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