What I Learned from Week 2 of 'Finding Your Way Home'

We were invited to 'write as someone else'.

What I learned is that I have great difficulty doing that.

A couple of times I wrote as an aspect of myself instead. The rest of the time I managed it, but struggled. This may be a clue as to why I am no good at writing fiction! I have occasionally written passable short stories, but I'm hopeless at novels, where character is more important.

I habitually write either poetry or nonfiction — essays and articles and things.

I can and do get fictional in the poetry. Never assume they are all autobiographical! Sometimes they are even 'first person' fictions. So I don't know why it didn't work in prose.

Perhaps it was a temporary thing. All I know is, I was too much present in myself and couldn't easily get out of that state.  I didn't yet learn why.

But maybe this is a clue:

I was still writing 'small stones': looking out at the world, not inward. But looking out through someone else's imagined eyes, that was the difficulty. Not so hard to be introspective as a fictional someone else, but hard to have any view of the outside world other than my own!

What I Learned from Week One

... of the Finding Your Way Home course.

We are asked to journal about this.

One thing I have learned is that having a special spot for writing, as we are invited to find, doesn't work for me. Writing happens wherever I am. Often that is at the computer. Often it is somewhere else with iPad — anywhere else, from bedroom to dining-room to park to chiropractor's waiting room.

I have also learned that I am definitely now one who writes on to a screen instead of with paper and pen. Who woulda thought it, a few years ago? It's just a preference, but a surprising one. I can't bring myself to go back to a paper notebook, even for the sake of this course, even as an exercise. Not that we have been asked to; it's not a requirement. But it seems kinda assumed, probably unconsciously. I'm sure I am still in the minority among 'creative' writers.

And I have not so much learned as confirmed that working on poetry takes precedence over pretty much anything else, including 'mindful writing'. Sometimes — often — I write my 'small stones' in verse, but I still give precedence to other poems which are not doing double duty as exercises in mindfulness.

Though, I suppose, all poems require a degree of mindfulness....