Poet Mary Oliver on scheduled writing sessions

If Romeo and Juliet had made appointments to meet, in the moonlight-swept orchard, in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy, and then more often than not failed to meet — one or the other lagging, or afraid, or busy elsewhere — there would have been no romance, no passion, none f the drama for which we remember and celebrate them. Writing a poem is not so different — it is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen. Of they make appointments with each other but are casual and often fail to keep them: count on it, nothing happens.

I have no aspiration to write poetry, but I daresay a morsel of this applies to my own writing. This is from the late, great Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry.