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“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
i am borrowing a little exercise from one of Instagram friends. trying to fill a notebook a month with word of my own. it is not meant to be seen as drudgery because what fun is that to approach your craft or hobby but a way of exploration. the notebook is nothing fancy. it is actually a refill notebook I got at Barnes and noble, that goes with one of their fancy notebooks. I am hoping to makea knitted cover for it (or find one on etsy, if I need to). the cost for it was low. the pages are lined and bigger than A5, which is too small for this type of writing. it is also super think, think 200+ pages. I almost got a moleskin but I get semi-precious about them. this feels better for practice. I feel like I need to practice more. I was writing today and I thought about how I went into writing my novel cold. I thought about how meh the experience was.
I thought about how I want to get away from the story of struggle and suffering writer. how that storyline no longer serves me. how I can let go trying to make things that don’t make me happy. how writing without joy is not serving anyone, especially me. don’t get me wrong. writing is not always easy but the whole drudgery story is one that I personally am tired of embracing. I let that go.
I let go of the striving. I let go of the need to know and plan. I let it go. It’s just time to write and that is enough.