I am a firm believer in doing the work required to maintain mental plasticity and for me this means writing.

I don’t have much of a publishing track record, I will admit.  My only commercially published writing was over 20 years ago and was related to technical topics.  My personal journal entries from the 2002-2006 period, covering the time period in which I lost my religious faith, have been available as a free Creative-Commons licensed e-book for years over on archive.org, but that’s about it.  Most of my writing never leaves the confines of my personal journal.

And that’s OK.  Writing is a joy.  It is a tool.  It is a way to explore inner space.  I’ve been a writer for almost as long as I’ve been a reader, the vast majority of my time spent on this earth.

The two forms of writing that I share with the world most often and most effectively are blog entries such as this one and songs that I write.  Both of these public forms of writing stem from my personal writing practice which I learned by reading books by writer and teacher Natalie Goldberg.  The two books that sparked my interest in writing practice were “Writing Down The Bones” and “Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life”.  I’ve since had the pleasure of meeting Natalie and thanking her for the massive impact those two books have had on my creative, personal, and professional life.

The writing practice that Natalie teaches approaches writing in a similar way as one might approach running.  You don’t sit and wait for the running bug to strike you, you just pick a time and go to it.  Do the thing for a predetermined time with regularity and let the action of doing the thing change you.  Writing can be like that.  You can just decide that you are going to write, set a timer, cut out distractions, and do it.  Don’t worry about what you think you want to say, just keep words coming until they figure themselves out.  If you make the space for things to be said, you will find that you have things to say.

I adopted this practice, timed writing sessions with no set goal other than being in the moment making words, when I was a teenager.  I have used this practice to write novels, stories, poems, journal entries, blog posts, and song lyrics.  I usually don’t know what I am going to write about before I get started.  I just choose my weapons (computer, fountain pen, typewriter, pencil, what have you…), set a timer, and go at it.  I like using technologies that make editing difficult because it makes me have to be more present in my writing if I can’t just backspace and correct.  Autocorrect of all types is absolutely banned from my writing outside of a business context.

I highly recommend this practice to everybody who is human and capable of recording words via media.  It’s good for you.  It’s good for your mind.

I’m starting to think about finally turning to some of the long dreamt of long form writing projects I have fiddled with over the years.  Getting a proper novel done, writing a memoir, cranking out a couple of the screenplays I have in mind.  I have thought of myself as a writer for ages, I have fairly good proficiency with the essay/blog format and  with songwriting.  I am looking forward to branching out and leveling up my writing game.

The one thing I find is consistently challenging for me is maintaining momentum on larger writing projects over time.  The memoir project, for example, has been nothing but a series of fits and starts for about 10 years.  I’ve written and rewritten and rewritten portions of it so many times.  I don’t even remember what I wrote most of the time, to be honest.  I’m currently reading a book called It’s All Right Now by Charles Chadwick.  The book is a fictional memoir of around 700-ish pages in which not a lot happens and the narrator is not a very interesting person and yet the book is lovely and I am enjoying reading it.

The thing I connect to about the main character, Tom Ripple, is that he just keeps plugging away at writing the record of his life and occasionally, as his perspective changes and time passes, he is tempted to go back and rewrite earlier sections with the benefit of hindsight.  It’s a wonder that anybody ever finishes any sort of memoir given the way life continues to evolve and casts new shadows on old memories but the thing is, if you take writing seriously and just go at it, like the character in this book, you have to make decisions on what to keep, what to throw, what to highlight, what to leave unsaid, when to rewrite and when to leave good enough alone.

This is a lesson I need to internalize in order to write a memoir.  I need to combine the timed, disciplined, focused writing sessions with some ground rules about not revisiting, not rewriting, not revising…  at least not until a complete first draft exists.

So, that’s my new plan with my writing.  I am going to get intentional.  I am going to continue to blog, I am going to continue to write songs, I will obviously continue personal journaling, but I am also going to learn to work on longer projects.  I’ve been writing a lot for a very long time.  I crank out thousands of words that nobody reads every week, sometimes daily.  I think I’m ready to become a memoirist and novelist.  Why not?