"You will learn generosity toward your own work by becoming more generous with others."

This was the advice that Cary Tennis, Salon.com's longtime advice columnist, gave to a frustrated, blocked young writer. She'd been working for a small publishing house and had become so depressed and agitated by the poor quality of "slush pile" manuscripts that she was now paralyzed in her own writing. Every piece of immature or poorly edited or incompletely imagined fiction that she saw made her feel simultaneously arrogant ("how can this person possibly believe he/she is a writer!") and paranoid ("what if I'm every bit as bad and self-deluded as these would-be writers?"). As a result, over time, this woman's own creativity had come to a grinding halt as she found herself caught between impossibly high standards and a deep lack of self-confidence.

Cary Tennis said a whole lot of things in response but these were the words that jumped right out at me:

You will learn generosity toward your own work by being more generous to others.

What a beautiful thought. I wish someone had said this to me when I was a young would-be novelist caught between my impossibly high standards and my deep lack of self-confidence.

I'm a musician more than a writer now, but the sentiment still holds. I am going to try to put it into practice.