The poet William Stafford liked to get up early before the house started to stir. He’d sit with pen and paper. Pretty soon he’d be thinking. Here’s Stafford describing the process:
A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions …
One implication is the importance of just plain receptivity. When I write, I like to have an interval before me when I am not likely to be interrupted. For me, this means usually the early morning, before others are awake. I get pen and paper, take a glance out of the window (often it is dark out there), and wait. It is like fishing. But I do not wait very long, for there is always a nibble — and this is where receptivity comes in. To get started I will accept anything that occurs to me. Something always occurs, or course, to any of us. We can’t help from thinking.
Stafford appears often in this collection of notes. Like him, I love to get up in the morning before the house starts stirring. I sit and think, pen and notebook in hand. I don’t do that because I think I should or out of some sense of obligation or duty. I do it because it’s one of the great pleasures of life.
• Source: William Stafford’s “On the Writing of Poetry” is in The Rag and Bone Shop of The Heart, a poetry anthology edited by Robert Bly, James Hillman, and Michael Meade; New York: HarperPerennial, 1993, p. 181.
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