Sherwood Anderson, Man of Focus

It's Sherwood Anderson's birthday.

(Anderson) wrote every day at a desk watching people walk by his window. He said, "Sometimes it seemed to me...that each person who passed along the street below, under the light, shouted his secret up to me." One rainy night, Anderson got out of bed without any clothes on, and began to write. Sitting there in front of the window, with the rain blowing on his bare back, he wrote the first of the stories that became his masterpiece Winesburg, Ohio (1919) about people in a small town, their misery and sexual frustration and violent desires. He dedicated the book to his mother, saying, "[Her] keen observations on the life about her first awoke in me the hunger to see beneath the surface of lives."

Now that's what I call focus. I'm often hit by blasts of writerly inspiration as well, but they're never so overpowering that I fail to get dressed or shut the window against a driving rainstorm first. Maybe that's what's holding me back: my failure to utterly surrender to the muse. Or simple common sense.

(From The Writer's Almanac.)