I’m directing a Writing Workshop tonight on behalf of my friend Keri, founder of The Family Journey. For those in the area who want to attend, it will be at Catalyst Coffee on the corner of Shields and Drake in Fort Collins.
As I sit planning this workshop, I realize how passionate I am about giving people the confidence and tools to communicate through writing. I’m reading Julia Cameron’s “Right to Write” and love her assertion: “Writing is like breathing. I believe that. I believe we all come into life as writers. We are born with a gift for language and it comes to us within months as we begin to name our world. We all have a sense of ownership, a sense of satisfaction as we name the objects that we find. Words give us power.”
I’m downright evangelical about this words being power belief. I publish get born because I believe writing is so powerful.
For the very daring among you, I encourage you to pick up pen or open laptop or whatever you do when you write. If you never have, here’s a starter. I hope that you find, as I have, that in the process of writing for your most important audience, you, a sense of peace, a more definded self, and purpose.
Close your eyes and breathe. Take three deep, cleansing breaths. Imagine your mind is a giant word swimming pool. Everything that happened today can be described in words. Take the pictures of the events of the day and “write” them in your mind. Watch as the words swim around the pool of your mind. Some words will dive and swoop in and around each other like playful otters. Others are floating at the top of your consciousness like leaves fluttering from a nearby tree. Some words sink all the way to the bottom weighed down perhaps by the emotion within them that’s packed like a leaded sphere. Others fill with water and slowly sift to the bottom, teasing you to dive down and squeeze them out. Now sit quietly and watch. The word pool is closed—no other words are allowed right now. Sit on the nearby pool lounger and watch your words. Breathe.
Now, find one of those words and pull it out of the pool. Write it down, and begin to follow where it leads you. Don’t be afraid to let it pull you down whatever road you’d like–fiction, non-fiction, a simple anecdote. No path is wrong–all lead to discovery.
When you’ve written three pages (yes, three pages,) put it down and treat yourself to chocolate, a glass of wine or the latest installment of the Twilight Series (no teen-novel snob here!!) Visit your pages again tomorrow and see where else they’d like to take you. When you’ve found your rhythm, submit something to the magazine so we can all share it.
Happy writing,
Heather
get born magazine 