“I assemble the dynamite but I am not ready to touch off the fuse.”

That’s a quote from Saul Bellow.  Bellow, a novelist, short story writer, and nonfiction author, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, the National Medal of Arts, and the National Book Award three times (having been nominated for it six times).  I think, then, that what he thought about his own writing might interest any modern-day writer.

According to a 1948 letter by Bellow, published recently in The New Yorker (available online only to subscribers), writing “freely” was his goal. About his second novel, The Victim, he wrote:

We usually think of obsessions as negative. A lot of obsessing comes with pain, overwhelming frustration, and a sense that there’s nothing you can do about the source of your obsession.  There’s another kind of obsession, though, and those more productive obsessions are what we learn about in Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions by psychotherapist and creativity coach Eric Maisel, Ph.D., and Ann Maisel.

Writers and other artists are often desperate for fresh inspiration and renewed motivation.  By learning concrete ways to tap into the brain’s potential, Maisel’s readers can better move forward in whatever realm they care most passionately about.  What the Maisels are talking about here is another way to look at flow, or focus, or deep engagement, or mindfulness.  Even if they’re not all defined as precisely the same experience, there’s no particular need to pull apart the threads of difference.  They’re all extremely positive states of mind, ones that creative people often crave and benefit from.

Unlike many of my friends, I’ve never been a Stephen King fan. Having read several of his novels over the past decade or two, I just don’t get it. I love a good story as much as anyone. His simply disappoint me. And yet his readers are the most devoted bunch.

In a post elsewhere, I wrote that his recent novel, Under the Dome, had the word shit on nearly every page. Commenters following that post reacted as though I’d blasphemed a national hero. They clearly hadn’t read my post clearly, which tells me something about the way they read Stephen King.