Falling in love again

I'm feeling guilty that my last blog post was seventeen days ago. According to the writers' websites I subscribe to, I should be blogging at least twice a week, tweeting and facebooking several times a day, keeping a notebook of scenes and experiences and overheard snatches of conversation, clocking up a minimum of 1000 words per day on my fiction work-in-progress, getting up earlier to write, redeeming the time.... there are so many well-meaning words of counsel and advice on the subject, I can easily lose sight of some important central truths: I write because I love to write. I write because I'm fascinated by the extraordinary power of the written word.

In the centre of Edinburgh, cheek by jowl with its elegant eighteenth and nineteenth century neighbours, squats an ugly sixties office block. It would be a hideous eyesore apart from one important redeeming feature: some enlightened body has turned it into a wayside poetry hoarding. Every time you pass the corner of Jenners Dept Store where historically, Edinburgh ladies always congregated to take afternoon tea, you can look up and be inspired by words:

This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful, it breaks the heart again and again. Alexander McCall Smith

Dear Edinburgh, how I remember you, your winter cakes and tea, your bright red fire, your swirling cloaks and clouds. Ian Crichton Smith

And one by the incorrigible Oscar Wilde that makes me smile whenever I read it:

It is quite lovely, bits of it.

I'm sure these snatches of poetry speak in diverse ways to every passer-by who takes time out from their iphone to raise their eyes and look up. Yesterday they were a demonstration to me of the sheer exultant power of words to conjure a feeling, an image, an atmosphere, a memory. They motivated me to keep writing when all the good advice on the internet was just making me feel inadequate.

Good advice certainly has its place but advice to writers can sometimes feel a bit like those self-help articles on fifty ways to improve your marriage. Sometimes all you have to remember is that you got married because you fell in love.

What motivates you in your work? What's your attitude to internet advice?