You may be up to your fanny in alligators – okay, grandad didn’t say fanny. His phrase was more alliterative. But even if you are up to your you-know-what in gators you can take 5 minutes to write something new.
In ten days, I have to write a new nonfiction book (2000 words), rewrite a nonfiction book (15,000 words), and critique 6 manuscripts. It is, to put it mildly, going to be a race. But I’ve signed up for a May-long challenge to write something new every day. Julie Duffy is the one running the challenge, StoryADay.org. Obviously, Julie’s goal is to write a new short story every day for a month. But Julie is also a practical person who knows that we each need to set our own goals.
A short story a day? With my to-do list? I knew that wasn’t going to happen. But I also think that Maya Angelou is correct when she said, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” So I’ve been writing a poem a day.
Just to make sure that my brain understand that there are not work, I’m not keying them in at the computer. I am writing them in my journal. I have a set of unlined pages in the back and I just pick a spot on the page and write. Some poems run top to bottom. Sometimes I rotate the journal and write with the gutter at the top of the page. It’s a mess but I’m just having fun.
So far I have a chant about birds, a violet haiku, a free verse poem about my never-ending pink bedroom, a morning-glory haiku, a chant about writing, and more. They are definitely a bit of a mess but that’s okay because they are fueling my creativity in those two nonfiction books that I’m working on and the decluttering that I’ve also undertaken. What can I say? Creativity is driving me to get to work. With that in mind . . . off to rewrite.
-SueBE
