On William Stafford and Becoming a Writer

It is a lazy blog day and I feel like cheating.  I stumbled on this response to one of William Stafford's books that I cranked out for a class at Washburn, but I think Professor Averill won't mind much if I reproduce it here.

William Stafford writes in Writing the Australian Crawl of his experience in grad school in Iowa – on becoming an Iowan.  But he could have simply been writing on becoming.  Becoming it seems is a transaction, incrementally exchanging or mixing what was and will be.  An equation that equals what is.  

Becoming a local, wherever you may be, takes an investment of time and self.  Is this true for becoming a writer?  Anyone can jot their thoughts into a journal, and if that is as far as one chooses to pursue writing that is well and good but does that make one a writer?  It seems to me the distinction between keeping a journal and writing is that ultimately writers need readers.

In the moment I first set my work upon the altar of reader consumption I had invested myself, thus beginning the transaction of becoming.  Had the very fact that foreign eyes were reading my words initiated some intermingling of me and the universe?  This catalyst created a schism within my mind in which my writing persona, my voice, began to demand an exchange of material by way of self-assessment and self-criticism.  And more, I wanted to hear what others thought.  I wanted to digest their perspectives, to apply it to being a better writer. 

Writing is a recursive process and isn’t really dissimilar from the process of actualization.  I proceed through the sentences and paragraphs of my life, down the page, inexorably toward the margin.  Periodically I stop to proofread and edit.  Sometimes faulty grammar and sentence structure catches my eye or my tone is off and I must undertake the effort of rewriting.   Until the pages become a story.

Stafford famously wrote "there is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough."  I try to embrace this notion, writing every day, even if it is just a grocery list, or a summary of what is on my table.  You never know what might spark a poem or a story.

Do you have any favorite bits of wisdom on writing?  Or a writer who has been formative in your development?