SOLSC #28 – On Writing

It is Tuesday and time to write a 'Slice of Life." 
Thank you  Two Writing Teachers for creating this supportive community
of teacher-writers!

My favorite place to write is here in my nook in our family room, looking out into our backyard. This is my writing chair:

For years, this writing chair was in my bedroom – which was a lovely place to write, too – a quiet corner of the house. When we remodeled this past year, this ‘bay’ in our family room sat vacant for a moment or two; I didn’t know what to do with the space. Then I heard it cry out to me: grab your journal and pen, and settle in, feel the sun at your shoulder! It is a wonderful location – I sit with my feet up on the ottoman, my quilt across my lap, and with bounteous light coming in through the windows. I could never have written here when the boys were young, right here in the center of the whole house. It would have been so noisy, one interruption after another. Now, however, it is just Tony and I here at home, and the family room is much more quiet. He’s often squirreled away in his den and I am here. This is where I sit and write each morning, readying for the day. 

I think ‘quiet’ is perhaps the number one ingredient for most of my writing – this need to be apart, to think.  

If I find myself stuck with my writing, I get up and do something else for a while. Here’s where I head if I am trying to ‘unlock’ some thoughts – my play area in my basement:

This is a fun space that I share with my granddaughters when they come by to visit. I have lots of craft materials – varied markers, scissors, paint, glue, stamps, and collage papers. I draw and I paint and I tinker here. I have a couple different projects in the works. It is great to have a space that I can just leave things be, and return to when the time is right.

One writing project I am in the midst of right now is to finish a children’s story. This is a self-propelled idea; I have been toying with this story for a couple of years now. When I say ‘finish,’ I mean: write the story from beginning to end. This story is really a poem, one that I have stopped and started several times now. I change my rhyming pattern, come up with a different way to start the story, lose the rhymes entirely, over and over, I am spinning in place. Each of these false starts keeps me from writing the story completely, from beginning to end. 

My basement play area is helping me get through this impasse. Working here, I laid out the story on index cards from beginning to end, sketching – doodling, really – the action. Now I am working on larger art paper for each card, creating collage images and writing words alongside. I am channeling my inner Oge Mora or Eric Carle.

When the words are flowing, I take out my computer and write. When I ‘jam up’ again, I work more intensely on the visual art that is needed next. Back and forth, illustrations to writing to more illustrations to still more writing. I still haven’t written a complete draft – but I am so much closer, thanks to this art ‘tinkering’ on the side. 

Writing is fun!

Where do you write and what are you working on?