Thinking Like a Writer

at Two Writing Teachers!

Hello slicing friends, I missed you last week!  Driving home from school last Tuesday, I felt as if a friend had canceled plans for a fun evening together.  I missed reading your stories, laughing and crying at the events in your lives.  I missed filling my writing soul with inspiration from your descriptions, your formats, your wordplay and your crafts.

Although admittedly, I had a mountain of papers to grade, so a part of me was also a little relieved to have one less thing to do.  But I was left with an empty spot inside where the writing should have been... and I had stories to tell.

That's the thing: I always have stories to tell now.  Or ideas that just have to be shared, now that there's someone to share them with.  Or poems that sprout out of my heart and need a page to sink their roots into.

Before the March Challenge, I had already started to re-awaken the writer inside me through slicing on Tuesdays.  But until I forced myself to blog for 31 straight days, I didn't realize how much more was left to awaken.  I had forgotten how deeply writing is a part of me.

The most wonderful and unexpected result of the March Challenge is that I've started thinking like a writer again.  Every day in March, I would search the world for seeds of writing.  I would watch more closely, hear more clearly, smell and taste and feel more deeply.  I would NOTICE.  Then I would sift through the seeds of noticing, weighing them and sorting them in my head, until I found just the perfect way to plant them.

While March is over, the noticing is not.  I see and hear the smallest details, those things that non-writers just walk right by.  I craft the perfect phrases to describe them in my head.  Words tumble and toss around, gathering speed and coming together until I just have to spill them onto a page.

I've written two poems this month: one last week about a very unlikely topic, and one I haven't shared yet (it's coming soon, I promise!).  I wrote two during March as well.  I wrote one last summer when I first started blogging.  Before that, I hadn't written a poem in nine years.  From late elementary school through high school, poetry used to spurt out of me at all hours of the day and night.  But as I got older and busier, I started silencing the poems.  I didn't have time to write a poem!  I had to write a paper or practice my horn or read or sleep or make lesson plans or grade papers!  Pretty soon I stopped noticing the seeds that poems come from.  I stopped watching the world in a writerly way.

I'm so glad I've found those seeds again.  I'm so glad I can see and hear and feel again.  I love to have words spinning and dancing and sprouting into poems in my head again.

Thank you.