Following My Own Advice!

So, I often tell my Creative Writers that one way to tackle "writer's block" is this: simply open the document/novel you've been working on (whether it's from yesterday or a month ago) and READ. That's all. No pressure to add a single word to it. Just read the most recent piece/chapter/scene you've written.

And what inevitably happens most of the time is that you WILL WRITE. By reading what you've written, you're placing yourself back into that world, amongst those characters. And your brain starts to churn with ideas -- so that, by the time you reach the end of that segment, you're ready to write, to add to it. Without even realizing it.

That's exactly what happened to me this morning! I've neglected my writing the past two weeks, because of mandatory faculty meetings, hours of prep work, and classes starting. So, with one precious day off, I told myself that I'd simply GLANCE at my writing, at what I wrote two weeks ago. That's all. No pressure to continue or to write a single word.

And before I knew it, I'd added five new pages! Very cool.

Best of all, it reminds me of how much I LOVE to write. I really do. When I was finished with those pages, I felt a kind of satisfaction that not even a successful teaching session could provide. There's something so wonderful, so personal about writing. It's like placing a little bit of yourself onto that page. There's nothing else like it.