Writing Practice...Again

Keep your hand moving. Don't think. Don't cross anything out. Be specific. Do not judge. Don't worry about punctuation. If you don't want to write about it, write anyway. Write what you really want to write.

The rules of Writing Practice, exactly as I wrote them in my notebook on August 15, 2016 at The Great Summer Writing Retreat with Natalie Goldberg. I'd taken off for the wilds and turned off my phone. Opened my notebook and held my pen. Made it scratch its way across the page. Again and again and again. And over the next eleven months, working in spurts -- August, October, November, June -- I filled a notebook with beautiful writing. And there it sits, like so many beads waiting to be strung into a necklace.

The memory came up in my Facebook memories this morning. And got me thinking about the powerful writing practice I learned there. I'm working with that material this summer to see if it can become something more than words in a notebook. It's been slow going and the words on the page feel like they are alive for me, but the same words typed in to a Word document in my computer feel flat. Lifeless. That may be why the work is slow going and I don't feel drawn to it. I may be approaching the task in the wrong way. But it felt like the place to begin. There may be another place in this to work.

And instead of simply beginning, I may just need to jump.

The Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019 continues. One hundred days of writing unedited ideas and following a prompt to its sometimes illogical conclusion. And showing up. Every. Single. Day.