Letters to a young poet!

Mario Vargas Llosa

Some words from his fantastic book

Letters to a young novelist

that has meant world to me!

....a man or a woman develops precociously in childhood or early in his or her teenage years a penchant for dreaming up people, situations, anecdotes, worlds different from the world in which he or she lives, and that inclination is the first sign of what may later be termed literary vocation.

This is where you are now: at the difficult and thrilling moment when you must decide whether you will go beyond amusing yourself with the creation of fictional realities, whether you will set them down in writing. It that´s what you choose, you will certainly have taken a very important step, though your future as a writer will still be far from assured. But the decision to commit yourself, to orient your life toward the achievement of your purposes, is already a way - the only possible way - of beginning to be a writer.

... the source of the literary vocation.... the answer, I think, is rebellion.

It is an all-encompassing, all-excluding occupation, an urgent priority, a freely chosen servitude that turns its victims (its lucky victims) into slaves.

& the best

Don´t write to live but live to write!

YES!