Ted Hughes & renewed inspiration

"But for me successful writing has usually been a case of having found good conditions for real, effortless concentration." – Ted Hughes

I read this Ted Hughes quote on Twitter this morning and it immediately inspired me to actually write something today. I haven't been inspired this past week, too many ideas, too many thoughts, too many personal things that make me want to throw and kick things. Coupled with the dreaded grey haze that sometimes creeps up at all the wrong moments. I think I chopped through it, or at least watered it down for a while, so I am just typing while I still have all of these interesting beginnings of thoughts going around my head, before I give up again for the day.
I love Ted Hughes. I actually grew to love Ted Hughes while I was writing my thesis on Sylvia Plath. While reading, dissecting and literally nearly living her journals and letters and poetry for nearly a year, and digging myself into an abyss of self-loathing and depression, reading Ted Hughes helped me climb out and reach upwards again. While Plath will now always symbolise to me how dangerous a dark mind and pure talent can be, Hughes will always be the rationaliser, the one who turns the table around to prove that poetry can also be uplifting and empowering.
Basically, that you don't have to be dark and depressive to be an amazing poet (although it can often help). Words need to be strung together to create meaning, but it takes talent to actually create strings and strings of words which open doors and close them at the same time, depending on how you interpret the flow. But I think the main lesson I learnt from both Plath and Hughes is that you can have amazing talent, but if you don't use it then there is no point in having it at all. Everything takes hard work, nothing just happens. I suppose that lesson goes for us all.

So it seems that yet again, Ted Hughes has provided the soft push in the back that I needed to move along. I needed it, just a little jab, to tell me that I can actually complete what I have been wanting to complete for the past 20 years. I feel that by finally deciding to write this novel that I have wanted to write for years I am finally actually going to complete something that I will be really proud of. It's going to be both catharsis and outpouring, and I don't know how I will come out of it on the other side, but I think that's just a game of wait and see.

I don't know if the novel will be finished by the end of the month, but it will definitely be done by the end of the year (first draft). Positive reinforcement and energy would be wonderful, thanks <3.

From September, by Ted Hughes:
"It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:
Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell
Time is nowhere."

Ted Hughes on thinking: