This is the quote that I need when my writing dries up, my characters sound like one more item on a long to-do list, and nothing in my imagination captivates:

Learn your craft, by any and all means. ... Then practice it with all the art and magic you can muster. Be worthy of your vocation, which is, after all is said and done, truly a career of danger and daring. -- George Garrett

That--like so many other quotes in this series--could be an entire writing class.

It reminds me again of just what is possible between the covers of a book.

And it shows me that I've tamed my vocation again. I turned it into something undernourished and miserable and bleak and grey.

Instead of a career of danger and daring.

Daring?? Sitting there in my pajamas thinking through the next few paragraphs?

Well, yes. Because whatever dark places the characters walk through, the writer walks there first. Whatever grief and pain, whatever knife edges stick out of the story: the writer has to feel them all first. And likewise, she's there for every victory, every bit of hope and joy. All the times when love wins through hardship.

Every single triumph.

Doesn't it--when we're doing it well--require every corner of our hearts? And every fiber of our minds? All our memories, and all our dreams?

There. There it is again. The thrill of all the possibilities in this path, in this crazy magical vocation.