by Laurie Wagner | Jul 30, 2012 | Blog
If you’re like a lot of people, you mean to create a writing practice, but when you make time to sit down and write, you’re not always sure where to begin. You might even have a story idea – something that happened to you that you want to write about – but getting those first words onto the page can be as back breaking as lifting bricks out of a ditch. That’s why I use Wild Writing to get my engine running and get those words out of me and onto the page. It’s the best way I know how to make my way towards what I really want to say. If you’ve taken my Wild Writing classes, you know that I use poetry as a jump off to get us going. I read a poem to the class, and then I pick a line from it that acts like a door that someone has left open and which our imaginations can sneak in through. The access lines are important, and not all poems have the ones that are the easiest for us to walk through. A line like, “my dog likes salmon cakes,” won’t work because it’s too specific. If I don’t have any experience of dogs and salmon cakes there’s no invitation in. So I try to find lines that are more general, but always compelling. Lines that many of us might be able to tumble into. After I give the line we write, pen never leaving the page, writing as fast as we can for 15 minutes, just getting those words out of us. Here’s the...
