The small packet of purpose that is my newly declared daily writing project is layering on its benefits. Like a little pearl coat covering the irritant of responsibility there’s a kind of luster now around the hours I commit to writing at day’s end.
The need to rest my brain from the day just passed and for the 2 ahead dictates that I simply share with you a new writing experience I had today:
The morning was spent going cross-eyed referencing an excel chart for a beautiful wine event I’ve got a small working cog part in. I’ll write about it next week.
From there, I grabbed my pen and pad… Oh, that would be an old school WRITING pad, and headed out to a small group workshop on writing your life story.
The MODs, Muses on Duty threw it my way, just before they flitted off for the weekend. It came in email and within a minute I hit REPLY and registered. It was no brainer to find 2.5 hours plus local travel time to hang with Young Adult fiction author and creative writing teacher, Lillian Boraks-Nemetz.
We went round the table to find out who was who and where they were from and what they hoped to find. We instantly felt that our mantra as a group was “we are not alone” in all we thirst to learn and to share.
Lillian went through 8 basics to consider when approaching our writing. Then an exercise and some techniques to trigger thoughts and memories. In the mix, tips on how to start putting them on paper.
We only came together for a few hours. The group’s 11 participants had varying experiences and ideas to get out of this gathering. We all needed to express ourselves, to share both our personal and our family histories.
Most everyone hinted at the ‘kind of experiences they underwent in their lives’. Some wanted to share the lessons. Some were filling in gaps for the therapy they said they should have had during the difficult days, decades and some for the childhoods lost due to war.
Our writing, we understood, would ultimately connect us to a deep dialogue with our own true self. That precious one that lies like a pearl, wrapped in the layers of the many other functioning selves we present to our world.
It will surely be worth the effort and the wait till it is lifted out of the sea of stories in which we all swim.
This last idea put me in mind of the whimsical book I read so many years ago, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, written by Salman Rushdie for an audience of one – his son. Here is a short clip of the author talking about it and the pleaure it gave his work.
