writing like cooking

Read more Ursula Le Guin wisdom from an interview on her website. She talks about letting stories grow and gestate, something that I am learning to do organically. In my short stories I need to know what is going to happen in order to sculpt and structure the story. I have yet to master organically writing the novel- I try to plot and plan- the one manuscript I have that grew organically doesn't have an ending! Opening spaces in my stories to expand them is something that I need to do- in order to get a manuscript to be a commercially viable size. I find it comforting reading that even a mistress like Le Guin has 7 or 8 false starts before settling into a first draft. She also says that isolating yourself from life to write is rubbish- which I agree with. After reading Shantaram I want to write a fantasy epic again, and I have chosen a few characters that keep popping up in my short stories to start with. The effect of Buddhism on my writing process is something I have yet to explore- I like the idea of writing mindfully and once you are in flow while you are writing it's hard not to compare it to the meditative state.