Long before Committed: A Memoir of the Artist’s Road was published, I had been sharing wisdom on the creative process I learned from artists interviewed on my 2010 cross-country road trip here on this blog. Now I’ve distilled five of them for a guest post on The Loft Literary Center’s Writer’s Block blog.
Those who have read Committed will find the examples familiar to them; they may also pick up on the fact that the last piece of advice–“Don’t wait for creativity to strike”–emerged as a narrative driver in Committed both explicitly and implicitly (through various extended metaphors) and was inspired both by people doing just that and others who, frankly, were stuck creatively, just as the narrator was.
Feel free to drop by Writer’s Block and offer your own advice!
The Artist's Road 
Hi Patrick, good to see you boiling down your road trip into a memoir. Four years later, we are using WordPress.com. Have you built an independent Web site? I’m in the process and thought I should keep my blog here for one more year as I build my mailing list. Any and all advice on this strategy is welcome. Thanks.
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Yes, still here in WordPress. I launched a dedicated site earlier this year that I’d welcome you check out — http://www.patrick-ross.com . The COMMITTED page on that site I share as a shortened URL — http://bit.ly/rossmemoir
People cleverer than me have incorporated their WordPress blogs into their personal websites. I found that too challenging to do while balancing a full-time job/life/writing life so I just created the Wix site and kept this. At some point in 2015 I’d love to figure out how to import this into Wix, but I can’t focus on that right now.
As to a mailing list, that is yet another beast I have, a Mailchimp newsletter. I’m not very good at promoting sign-ups for it, however. I don’t like those pop-ups asking you to sign up that appear on others’ blogs, for example.
Marketing. Ugh.
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