What can Snoopy teach us about writing?

I am an avowed Charlie Brown lover. I have always loved the entire Peanuts gang and have always had a profound admiration for the late Charles Schulz. Charles Schulz had a saturnine personality (not unlike myself!) and parlayed the fear and depression that often descended upon him into a wonderful array of characters. Probably Charlie Brown was most like himself. Snoopy, too, seemed to be his outlet for the often crazy and frustrating life of the creative artist. Even as a kid I have always loved the image of Snoopy perched on the top of his dog house with his typewriter. I loved, even then, his single-mindednesss, his stick-to-it attitude, letting nothing deter him from what he needed to put down on the page.
Here is what Monte Schulz, Charles' son, has to say about his father, snoopy and the creative process in his foreward to the book Snoopy and the Writing Life:

"Snoopy perched in front of a typewriter on his famous doghouse is one of the enduring images of Peanuts. His flights of literary imagination take hold of every writer and remind us (as if we needed reminding) that once we admit to ourselves we require and adore the written word and the writer’s life, we are bound to chase that ever elusive perfect sentence, paragraph, story, novel, poem. Rejections, blocks, false starts, and dead ends only distract us; they cannot lead us away from this holy destiny we know is ours. Without a doubt, my father used Snoopy the author to express his own love and frustration with the creative process, to illuminate the writer’s life by poking fun at the often incomprehensible divide between author and publisher while showing the amazing resilience of the everyday writer struggling for acceptance and acknowledgment. Some know fame and other anonymity, but my father believed there were no short cuts to be had in the life of the dedicated artist. There is only faith and persistence. In the last days of his life, my father knew that his own commitment to the art of the written word had been honest and complete, and when he passed from this world, he left as a writer. We should all be so fortunate."

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