The Writing Never Stops

The writing never stops, if you’re a writer, does it?

Something as simple as calling your current pet by your former pet’s name can spark a poem, or a paragraph and maybe even a story? A chapter in your book?

I had decided to write for an hour each day. I am a published writer who has slacked off in the last couple years. Covid, moving, other health issues, depression . . . you name it, I used it as an excuse? More like a reason.

There you go . . . writing merrily along and realize there’s a better way to say that, a better word . . . and it doesn’t stop there, does it? Then there is proofreading and punctuation corrections and misspelled words, etc. Maybe a paragraph works better in another location in the piece? Manuscript . . . not piece.

So I debated whether to share the new poem here, but I do not believe anything I write here is copyrighted and that’s the goal, isn’t it? I created this. . . It’s mine . . . I’d no more hand it to anyone who would take it than I’d hand a child of mine to a stranger . . . some relatives are iffy as well . . .

So YOU have the “what if” mindset? Do you have the “and also” thought patterns? Does your mind dream up things you can only write about? There’s probably a genre for that.

So, this is not a full hour’s writing (lucky you?) but it will count for today. I have plans for today. I usually don’t. I’ll just post this because I was surprised when the poem appeared on my screen as I wrote it. I can usually tell when there’s more to come by the number of lines that automatically pop into my head.

I had a dog named Joy. Joy is still alive and well, living with my son, but I fell twice while walking her 50 pound self, and my son said last time he took her while I mended, that he was NOT bringing her back. And he hasn’t. I skype with her sometimes. But she is happy where she is and I haven’t fallen in eleven months.

I went to the shelter and rescued the oldest cat they had. But still when I talk to her, half the time I call her Joy. Her name is Hera. She was named after a goddess and I kept her name. She knew her name. She was almost ten years old when I got her, and she has fit into my life perfectly!

So today when once again I called her “Joy” as I was talking to the cat, this line popped into my head:

Whoever lived here before me was called Joy . . .

and the rest of the poem began to recite in my mind and I sat down and wrote it out.

There’s that poem and there’s this blog, and my writing is done for today.

The two best things you can do for your craft is to write frequently and read a lot , . . that’s today’s advice. And even if you’re washing dishes and words/lines pop into your mind, stop long enough to write them down. We called it a “Writer’s Notebook” in the old days. You took it everywhere with you. In it we wrote descriptions of places, weather, people . . . whatever you might draw upon to write a scene one day, and also writing ideas . . . jotted down thoughts and beginnings of stories or plots or poems . . . and you never suffered from writer’s block (what’s that? something my friends probably wish I’d get once in while when I’m emailing . . . ), but writing knows no bounds. Enjoy it.