Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

This is how it works: You’ve always wanted to be a writer, but instead you decide you should become a health care worker. You go to school for four years. You get a degree in social work. You are at your first day of your new job, listening to an orientation, and you realize you really did want to be a writer. You quit your job, go to the library w

The memory can be something that happened five seconds ago.

Over and over I have done timed writings beginning with “I remember,” “I am looking at,” “I know,” “I

It’s better to figure out what you want to say in the actual act of writing.

feel, I don’t feel.” I use these for warm-ups. It stretches my mind in positive and negative directions, in obvious and hidden places, in the conscious and the unconscious. It also is a chance to survey my mind and limber me up before I direct my thoughts to whatever I am working on.

So finally a writer must be willing to sit at the bottom of the pit, commit herself to stay there, and let all the wild animals approach, even call them up, then face them, write them down, and not run away.

Finally, don’t worry about style. Be who you are, breathe fully, be alive, and don’t forget to write.

If I give myself a little gap, I’m off for an hour daydreaming. You have to learn your own rhythm, but make sure you do some focused, disciplined “keeping the hand moving” to learn about cutting through resistance.

Style is as simple and direct as that. It requires digesting your experience, whatever that experience is, so you may write about it.