We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.
My mind is swirling from the past few days of trying to get in touch with my 20-year-old self for a future memoir and loads storytelling technique. Exhausting. Especially while tying the final pretty pink organza bow around the Tranquility du Jour Anthology going to print any moment.
Above is a photo of my process here with Jeffrey Davis (interviewed here in 2007) and an amazing group of writers. I've been toying with a memoir outline, pondering the concept for well over a year, and am finding the journey into a new genre, well, oh-so-challenging.
I've described it to a few colleagues as that teary feeling I had in 7th grade special honors math class when I really should have been in remedial math class. Yep, an 11-year-old all over again not grasping basic algebra.
Or whatever we did with numbers at that age. I still cringe when thinking about the teacher coming over the my desk to help me understand the basics as my eyes welled up with tears and my peers quickly turned in their easily-understood assignments.
Before I dash off to slumber, I wanted to share a few writing quotes to show that the process is cathartic and empowering as well as incredibly vulnerable. Yes, it's hard. Yes, you may feel like you're back in subject where you struggled. Dumb math. And, yes, it's good to challenge yourself.
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.—Maya Angelou
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.—Ernest Hemingway
If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.—Stephen King
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.—Sylvia Plath
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.—Henry David Thoreau
The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.—Anaïs Nin
Share your story. And avoid math class. Bisous. x
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