#Writing

Plans for May

I’ve been writing a poem a day in April, which has been great fun and I have been really surprised to discover that I can express myself well in that genre.

(And by ‘express myself well’ I mean that I am saying what I mean to say in a way that is pleasing to me. That’s different than saying that my poems are good. Some are good and some are ok. And both are grand by me at this point.)

I’m going to take a break from daily poetry though and do a story a day in May (along with Julie and the team at, you guessed it! Storyaday.org

Will I write a perfect publishable story every day in May?

I will not.

Will I write something vaguely resembling a story every day in May?

I certainly will.

After 10 days of writing…

I am reaching the point where topics are popping up for me, even when this app isn’t open. But even though the writing itself is fairly easy, t I am still finding myself a bit reluctant to write here.

I think it’s mostly because I am not sure what I want this blog to be about. But I also find myself thinking ‘Don’t write that here, that’s a post for your coaching blog.’ Or ‘That topic belongs on Fit is a Feminist Issue.’

I don’t necessarily put those topics in those places but I still don’t put them here either.

(This tells me that I need a ‘container’ for those ideas so I can easily return to them. I’ll have to create a file or something.)

But, for some topics, they are just too big to get into. They’ll take more time than I want to spend at that moment. Or the energy cost will be too high.

A container, metaphorical or otherwise, won’t help with that.

That’s going to require a different solution but I haven’t figured that out yet.

Anyway, the ideas are coming more easily so that’s one hurdle cleared in 10 days.

And once I settle on a topic of the right size and shape, the writing itself is pretty straightforward.

So, I’m going to label this experiment ‘so far, so good’ and carry on.

Sunday Morning Collage

A photo of a collage
A photo of a collaged page with bits of paper and stickers. Images in the collage include a skull with a purple moth on top, a snake, a girl with an umbrella patting a dog, tulips, a stamp, a few vintage-looking photos of people and ads, small painting of coloured circles outlined in black on a brown background with black pinstripes, and text reading ‘impressions of reality…’ ‘crystal’ and ‘stones, bones, and skin’

Well, truth be told, I started this last night but I’m still playing with it this morning.

I was just holding a small piece of flower-printed paper over the right hand side of this collage trying to figure out where to put it when I was struck once again by how weird the creative process is.

When I’m writing, particularly fiction, the feeling of getting things ‘right’ is really strange.

Sometimes my words come easily and sometimes I have to carve each one by hand but they often (always?) feel like I am remembering or uncovering them rather than inventing them. As if they are something I already know but I have to go through a process to remind myself.

And when I am trying to figure out something about a character or to iron out a plot point, there is always this sense that I am trying to figure out something that already exists. Like I am guessing until I get the correct answer. Sure, sometimes I have to put an ‘almost right’ answer for the moment so I can keep the story moving but I always know I will have to come back to it.

So, there’s a certain feeling to it when the words or the ideas start to work. And then when I go to revise, there is a different feeling of sliding words and ideas from place to place until they fit- like figuring out the picture in one of those little square puzzles made from tiles.

A similar thing happens in storytelling or in creating a workshop, I uncover the ideas and words until I *get* them and then the story or the presentation is mine.

When I draw, I usually start with an idea of something to draw and then go through the process of discovering what else wants to be in the image, what else belongs.

With collage/junk journaling, unless I am using the process to work through an issue, it’s rarely about expressing a certain idea.

Mostly, I start with a piece of text or an image that appeals to me and then I flip through my current junk journal to see what kind of background page it needs.

Then I go through my bits of paper, my stickers, my ephemera, to see what else belongs with that starting piece.

That sense of it ‘belonging’ or (in drawing) of it ‘wanting’ to be there is very much the same kind of feeling as ‘remembering’ or ‘discovering’ in my writing and storytelling.

There is that real feeling that the thing I am making, be it a story or be it an image, already has a shape, a reality, and my job is to figure it out.

I often find myself saying ‘Oh, right!’ as I scribble words down, as I outline an image I have drawn, or as I finish moving an image around my collage and set it in the right place.

For example, the collage in the photo above, was going to be two separate things. I was just working on the left hand side until that rectangular piece of paper with the woman on it ‘wanted’ to bridge both pages.

That’s when I ‘discovered’ that this was a two page collage and that the left hand side would have one type of images while the right had something entirely different.

And my little piece of flowered paper belongs on the right, not the left, but I just don’t know where yet.

I’ll just keep moving it around until it tells me where it belongs.

A Poem A Day In April

For the longest time I would respond to the question “What do you write?” with “Pretty much anything you’ll pay me to write…except poetry.”

It’s not that I don’t like poetry.

And it’s not that I can’t write poems.

It’s that I am not particularly drawn to write poems and I have never worked on my skills in that area.

I am much more comfortable in other forms or word work and I haven’t felt the need to dig into poetry.

And, of course, given how my brain works, I was forgetting that poets work in drafts the same as every other writer…the same as any other creative person.

Then, recently, I received Sage Cohen’s newsletter in which she mentioned her book Write a Poem a Day: 30 Prompts to Unleash Your Imagination and I was intrigued.

Could I write a poem every day for 30 days?

Well, if I didn’t worry about writing a *good* poem, I probably could.

And since lots of people write a poem a day in April (it’s poetry month!), it seemed like a good time to give it a whirl.

I didn’t officially join a challenge or anything, I just decided to putter along with it by myself.

And the first two days have been really interesting.

As I mentioned above, I had previously forgotten that poets wouldn’t just be able to create a perfect poem on the first try but I had come to realize that poets do drafts just like anyone else.

However, I hadn’t really thought about what that would mean from a ‘getting down to work’ standpoint.

I mean, when I need to write prose, I have long since abandoned the idea that I need to be inspired…

Wait, that’s not completely true.

My conscious mind has abandoned that idea but it still floats around my subconscious and keeps me from getting started sometimes. It’s only when I actually turn my conscious attention to a slow-starting project that I realize I have been waiting for inspiration.

In fact, ‘Are you waiting for inspiration?’ is the first thing on my list of check-in questions for when I am feeling stalled.

I am a professional writer. I know that inspiration often only kicks into gear once you are already writing.*

But, I guess, unconsciously, I saw poetry as something different, something a little more inspiration-fuelled.

However, on Saturday, April 1, when I read Sage Cohen’s prompt for day 1 and sat down with my notebook, I wasn’t inspired but I was determined.

So I did the same thing I do at the beginning of any writing project, I started putting words on paper,

And then I rearranged those words.

And then I added some more.

Took some away.

And then I had a poem.

Not a great but a decent one. Definitely one that I could shape into something better if I worked on it a bit more.

It was a really cool realization.

The process was the same. I could use the exact same skills and produce something entirely different.

Now, I’m not saying that two days of poems makes me a poet. And poetry commissions won’t be a thing.

But it has been amazing to realize that I can express ideas in poems by just sitting down and working at them.

I don’t need to know anything else.

I don’t need to build my skills first.

I can just keep moving words around until they end up in the right places.

And it’s fun.

*Yes, sometimes it shows up first and I am drawn to the page but mostly I decided to start writing and the act of getting started pulls inspiration to me.

Thursday, hmm?

‘This must be Thursday,’ said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. ‘I never could get the hang of Thursdays.’

Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Is it boring to write about the day of the week? Probably.

Am I doing it anyway? Yep.

Well, kinda.

Thursdays are always a bit weird for me. A kind of reckoning about how well my to do list matched my capacity this week and then a reset of priorities for Friday.

Not an exciting thing to talk about and it would definitely be a short post.

A boring and short post.

BUT!

Sometimes you have to let yourself be boring so you can build a habit.

Creative practices, like drawing or writing or blogging get easier the more frequently you do them.

If you stop for a while, you tend to fall into the trap of thinking that you need to create something good or interesting in order to make the practice worthwhile.

The truth is, though, that if you take away the pressure to be good or interesting, you are more likely to be able to create often. When you create often, it is easier (as I mentioned above) and, oddly enough, you are more likely to create something interesting or good.

For an interesting story (stories) about that fact, visit Austin Kleon’s blog.

So, since I want this kind of writing to be easier, and (eventually) interesting, I’m going to just plug away at it, even if I’m boring sometimes.

GIF of a kid lying across an office chair idly spinning around.
Image description: GIF of a kid lying face down across an office chair, spinning idly. The chair is in an open plan kitchen/living room area with a wooden floor. The space looks lived-in and cluttered but in an ordinary living sort of way not a overwhelmingly messy way.