write-your-own friday.
How about a writing exercise every Friday, one that–over time, if you do them every Friday–will leave you with a pile of 89-cent composition books from the Piggly Wiggly full of you. Your story. Your life. Your fears and laughs and thoughts. Something to leave behind, something to re-read when we're 110 years old and living in the Tybee Island Senior Citizen Fun Hut in adjoining rooms.
So, every week for "write-your-own Friday" (an idea I must credit to Mr Brilliant who–after all–is brilliant), I'll provide a simple writing prompt. Spend just 10 minutes a day on this prompt FOR A WHOLE WEEK! A whole week on one simple thing! Ten minutes a day for seven days! Miracles will happen! Threads will be pulled.
If you'd like to make drawings or paintings instead, you go on ahead and do that, sugar. Each day, a clarification, a ten-minute meditation in color. Whatever rocks your boat rocks mine.
Each day, read what you wrote the day before, circle a "hot spot," a word or phrase that stands out to you, and write for 10 minutes on that. Get a timer, set it, write and stop. Close your notebook, make the kids' lunches, feed the pets, do the laundry, stalk Johnny Depp–all the miraculous actions of every day–and then do it again the next day: open, read, circle, write, close.
Just ten minutes a day. Lock yourself in the bathroom to do it if you can't get time alone otherwise and make hints about some kind of intestinal disorder that might cause you to do so regularly. Do not wait until you have the perfect notebook, no. Pick up a slightly used receipt and use the back if you have to. This is not about perfection, people of the earth. It is about process. Your process. No one but you.
Each assignment won't seem like much…by itself. But life is an accumulation, isn't it?
Writing prompt #1: "A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless." -May Sarton
Describe the "worn, comfy chair" in your home, either present or past. Just describe it — your favorite chair — in as much detail as you can. Describe. Show. Don't tell me. Show me the chair.
Let's see where it takes us.
(photo from here)
