reflect, deflect, introspect

"We do creative brainstorming in a journal to record what we are seeing in our minds, to learn to focus on the insight of the imagination, to learn to express it, and then to look back at what we have said and pull out certain strands and consolidate and reshape.

It's a process very much like birthing a child. Poems and other art forms have a gestation period. You may have an idea, but it may need to hibernate for years before it's ready to have a life of its own. I tell writers to catch and record these seminal ideas, these seeds, the minute they arrive, or they will be blown away in the wind of active living."

poet Luci Shaw, in Breath for the Bones