What to Do

I started reading Anna Quindlen’s Blessings, called by one reviewer “a polished gem of a novel.” Already I can picture myself learning from it and despairing.

In a Writers Digest (October ‘06) interview, Anna spoke about the good and bad of reading great writers’ works. There’s the help amazing stories give you, the absorption of technique you can experience. But there’s also the descent into depression after tasting the craft of a Dickens, a Faulkner, a Yeats. What to do?

As Ms. Quindlen put it, “You just have to push your own inadequacies to the back of your mind and get on with it.”

That’s pretty much where I live these days.