Make creative writing part of your everyday

Well, here we are again.

Those of us who dearly want to write creatively just for fun and maybe, if something resonates, send it out into the world for comment, competition and/or publication, but who can’t find the time. Find the time, make the time, steal the time, create the time. Call it what you want but lately I haven’t been getting it. Somehow we need to make creative writing part of our everyday.

Over the years I’ve tried various tips – all of them successful to a degree. Sarah Selecky’s daily prompts are good starters and a few half-decent short stories have come from them. Opening any old book on the shelf to a page, placing my finger on the first sentence I come across, writing it out and continuing with a story from there – that’s been fun! Typing ‘prompts’ into a search engine has been useful.

For me, though, it’s more about the timing than the topic. It’s about the ‘when’ not the ‘what’. When do I sit self down to write creatively, just for me? The Morning Pages has been great for many as it helps establish a morning ritual dedicated to our own creative practice. Surely there is no better symbol to self than to get up, wipe the sleep from our eyes, take a cup of our favourite and do that thing that we most need to do for the day. In my case, creative writing. But what about exercise, yoga, meditation?

And so I start again. Not from scratch. I have decades of experience behind me.

I need to write for myself even though I spend most of my days writing for others, possibly because I spend most of my days writing for others …

It’s time. I’ll finish this blog now, and start writing, knowing, of course, that I already was.

May your words pour onto the page,

PS – Sarah Selecky’s prompt encouraged me to write about a ‘forest fire’ from the finish backwards … apt, given Black Saturday has just passed.