Meg, I tried this today. 7 minutes turned into an hour and a brand new story that I'm really excited about (featuring lots of mulch and a very "off-kilter" character ;-) The exercise really freed me to just lose myself in whatever came, not to judge, and most of all to have fun. Thank you!!
Thanks for this, Meg. I loved how other activities suddenly start to "glow." They do, right?—and in magnificent iridescence. It feels like a rule: "Anything procrastinatable will make the rest of the world glow, including paying quarterly estimates." And the Jane Smiley quote from the end is just great. (Plus the timed inventory of first lines sounds fun!)
Love "magnificent iridescence". This is it. Like, right now, an extra dog walk is beckoning! Because ... You guessed it. I have not written today. Yup.
This morning, I read an essay called "Calendars Poetica" in which the author talks about her writing during the first months after her first son was born. And this idea of finding excuses not to write came up! Here it is (month for the entry: May): "I write because the lighter mornings wake me with a dewy promise that there is life after all this ice and snow. I clean my office as a way to procrastinate from writing. Papers from the semester's windy days are sorted and filed. I am shot through with bud and bloom. Strawberry plants have run wild under my porch, and I can smell the pale berries growing in spite of the dark. A nest of cuckoo wasps, the size of a ping-pong ball, grows in the slats of my screen door" (p. 83). The book is called "World of Wonders," by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. The book is very fun to read!—part memoir, part nature book. (The author is the poetry editor for the Sierra Club's magazine.)
Meg, I tried this today. 7 minutes turned into an hour and a brand new story that I'm really excited about (featuring lots of mulch and a very "off-kilter" character ;-) The exercise really freed me to just lose myself in whatever came, not to judge, and most of all to have fun. Thank you!!
That is wonderful Kelli! Thank you so much for letting me know! xxx
Thanks for this, Meg. I loved how other activities suddenly start to "glow." They do, right?—and in magnificent iridescence. It feels like a rule: "Anything procrastinatable will make the rest of the world glow, including paying quarterly estimates." And the Jane Smiley quote from the end is just great. (Plus the timed inventory of first lines sounds fun!)
Love "magnificent iridescence". This is it. Like, right now, an extra dog walk is beckoning! Because ... You guessed it. I have not written today. Yup.
This morning, I read an essay called "Calendars Poetica" in which the author talks about her writing during the first months after her first son was born. And this idea of finding excuses not to write came up! Here it is (month for the entry: May): "I write because the lighter mornings wake me with a dewy promise that there is life after all this ice and snow. I clean my office as a way to procrastinate from writing. Papers from the semester's windy days are sorted and filed. I am shot through with bud and bloom. Strawberry plants have run wild under my porch, and I can smell the pale berries growing in spite of the dark. A nest of cuckoo wasps, the size of a ping-pong ball, grows in the slats of my screen door" (p. 83). The book is called "World of Wonders," by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. The book is very fun to read!—part memoir, part nature book. (The author is the poetry editor for the Sierra Club's magazine.)