October 1st - National Make a Mistake Day

Did you know that October 1 is National Make a Mistake Day?

Imagine A WHOLE DAY devoted to sanctioned mistake-making that we can feel proud about!

Today, let mistakes that happen run off like water off a duck's back. Avoid guilt, shame, or frustration over not-being-perfect. Can you let go? What intended gaffe will make you laugh?

Shrug it off. Take a breath. Relax. Laugh. Laugh some more.

Enjoy making your mistakes today and tomorrow and next week. You're allowed to celebrate errors and in unlimited amounts. Let go of the pressure of trying to be perfect. This is life — right here — in all its imperfect glory.

Celebrate mistakes and make 'em good!

Creative Write: Write about the greatest mistake you have made. What did you learn? Where did it lead? Did it turn out to be a mistake after all?

Threshold of Choice

Often the best writing occurs when a writer arrives on a threshold.  At this place the disorder of experience, emotion or memory meets the ordering power of words.

Recall a memorable experience just before and after it happened.  The threshold forced a choice and took you to another place.

Discover the nature of your own personal theshold.   Place yourself there and write from that dynamic location.

Creative Write:  Write the memory of a choice made "just in time."  Bring the reader into your experience at the threshold moment.  How did the choice move you into a better outcome?  Write again about the other choice you could have made. Where might that decision have taken you?

What did you read as a child?

Once upon a time children's stories encouraged young readers to behave for their parents. Children's literature enjoys a history of fables, fairy tales and stories. What did you read?

Writers like Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) and Shel Silverstein (Where the Sidewalk Ends) challenged what a children's book should deliver. These authors ignored the rules of behavior and brought a shock of subversion to the genre. They created scary, sily and yet sophisticated reading. Their books encouraged human behavior even if it deviated from acceptable.

Their editor Ursula Nordstrom of Harper & Row called the books, "good books for bad children." These books promoted absurdity causing children to laugh at the wrong things.

In 1957, The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss used only 233 different words of simplicity revealing one could achieve the sublime under absurd constraints. Reviewers applauded the move away from the dreary text of Dick and Jane.

Creative Write: Write about the books you read as a child. How did they affect your behavior, vocabulary, and future writing?

 

Writing from the Unconscious Mind

Writing ideas and solutions lie waiting, hidden in what Sigmund Freud called the "unconscious mind." He felt memories, feelings and mental content - outside conscious awareness - affected all individuals. The key element of his theory focused on the causes of mental disorders and how to deal with treatment.

While Freud promoted the "talking cure" writers moving into the unconscious mind can discover the "writing cure."  Freeflow writing explores and brings forgotten tendrils of thought and connections to the surface. Possibilities and solutions journey through the fingers to the page or screen.

When writing to unearth these unconscious notions, a mine of hidden treasures exists. Writers can uncover and use "repressed" notions to develop characters or to generate other forms of writing.

Neuroscientists focus on how much mental life happens without knowing much about it. Let writing become the process to use all concerns in productive ways.


Creative Write:  Appreciate your underground stream. Write into the caverns that contain gems and gold bits in hiding. Take advantage of shapes and shadows. Experience colors, sounds and scents. Spiral unconscious thoughts and feelings to the surface.

Story Starts

Play with these story starts.

1. You awaken in shallow water on an island somewhere in the Pacific.  No idea how you got there,  you rise from the sand.  Dizzy and hungry, you amble toward a grove of palm trees and then into the jungle.
What happens next?

2. You wander the beach at sunset and discover a message in a bottle.  The writer's request astounds and makes you want to . . .  and then . . .

Share your starts with us.

Typewriters to Laptops

Do you remember plunking away on a Remington, Royal or Smith-Corona? Did you take a typing class to learn the QWERTY keyboard?  Or did and do you still muddle along with fingers in hunt and peck?

Jammed keys and carbon paper once ruled the day.  Writing progressed from draft to draft by rolling pages out of the platen.  After a sigh, one inserted another white page and soldiered on: musing, typing, correcting, and typing again. It required hours of focused thought.  

Back then, cutting and pasting meant cutting pages into paragraphs and taping the choices in new order. This also involved pencil or pen corrections in the margins. A bottle of white fluid corrected small errors.

Then the electric typewriter arrived which had tape that corrected by removing lines of type. 

With the word processor, paragraphs could be re-arranged by a new form of cut and paste. Lines moved around right on the screen.

Now with laptop computers, one can go anywhere to patter away at the keyboard.  Freedom to write!

Creative Write:  Share your story.  Where are you in the progress from the manual typewriter to the laptop?  What have you discovered along the way?  If you have only experienced writing on a computer, begin with your first experience using technology to write.

What's in a TItle

Choose a title for its ability to intrigue, inspire wonder, or even confuse the reader into your story, essay or poem.  Try not to tell too much about content in your title.  Make the first words entice your reader to read on.  Let your title establish new territory.

Here's an article on titles:

http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgathering-storytelling/writing-tools/146150/what-song-titles-teach-us-about-the-importance-of-good-headlines/

Play with ideas:

l.     Look through your story for phrases that might work as a title.  Do any sentences change the way you see the story?

2.    Check out your favorite book or story titles.  Do they intrigue the reader?  What questions do they ask of the reader? 

3.    Does your title reveal expectations in plot, theme and or tone?

4.    Does the title capture an important image?  Consider these: Steel Magnolias, Atlas Shrugged, The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, Angle of Repose, White Oleander, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Crossing to Safety.

5.    Look also at bits of dialogue and if they encapsulate an idea for your title.

6.    Think of titles as advertising.  How would Nike title your story?  Or Coke?

7.     Flip through a poetry book to see titles poets use.  Could you borrow a line? Credit the poet, of course.

8.    Would humor work in your title? 

9.    Ask the reader a question in your title.

10.  Try re-arranging words in your title in an unexpected order for a different approach.

Work with your title to transform a sense of what the story reveals. 

Creative Write: Share a few of your favorites with us and why you feel they work.

Gratitude for the Day

Teachers in the  Zen Buddhist tradition save the best wisdom for their last breath in life. With their final exhalations, they utter their best understanding of life's processes.

One Zen teacher’s final utterance,  “Thank you very much. I have no complaints" feels like a life accepted and complete.

Daily we struggle and work with what we discover about ourselves and the world.  Choices allow us to do what we can. With its causes and conditions life provides just what we need on every occasion. Even though it might not seem like it at the time. It's up to us to make the most of each moment.

We live in challenging times on myriad levels.  Without permitting judgment or false distortions to get in the way, we can figure most things out.

Using the words, “Thank you very much. I have no complaints" or a similar axiom to evaluate each day, we gain the truth of daily experiences.  Gratitude for frustrations as well as triumphs will inform as we employ daily writing to engage with problem solving skills.

Creative Write:  Thank your day for its greatest challenge. Write it out.  With a mindful approach to problem solving with words, use positive energy to engage with what appeared impossible at the time. You will write yourself into, "I'm possible" as a result.