“I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that’s the job of art.” (Andre Dubus III)

 Recently, I was invited to submit a guest article for the SheWrites.com author blog. They suggested that I write about the connection between kindness and writing.

Over the last four years, I’ve explored kindness from every angle I could think of—and some were a bit of a stretch (baseball, jazz, cats). But I hadn’t thought much about kindness and writing, even though they’re two of my favorite things.

I’m pretty happy with the resulting article. Since it wouldn’t be proper to reprint the entire post here, I’m including the first couple of paragraphs and then a link to the full article on the SheWrites site. I hope it resonates for you.

What do writing and kindness have to do with one another? Why not conflate writing and prudence, or kindness and water-skiing? Is there more than just a passing connection between these two wondrous endeavors? Could it be that there’s an important place for kindness in the writer’s life and process?

In my multi-year exploration of kindness, I’ve noticed that some of the principles of living a kind life can also be applied to living the writerly life. There are skills that must be cultivated to extend kindness: learning to pause, learning to stay present and pay attention, withholding judgment, and employing curiosity, to name just a few. These same skills power a good writer. Where would we be without the capacity to wonder why, or notice details, or allow our story to unfold without judging our writing or our characters too quickly? Kindness also requires that we be patient, that we take the time necessary to achieve our desired goals. Writing? Ditto. And kindness asks us to overcome inertia and our own innate laziness to extend ourselves outside our comfort zone. Writing? Yep, that, too.

Read the full article here