A Room of Your Own: Cartwheeling

lizshine74by lizshine74

In A Room Of Your Own.

When I was eleven years old I would spend hours and hours out in the yard working on my cartwheel. This went on for years, and that is probably why I can still turn a pretty impressive cartwheel.

It’s been harder to accept that some of the writing I’ve done is just like all those cartwheels—just practice. I tend to believe that every story I ever write should be bound in a book. I want to be a writer so badly and getting work out in the world makes that label feel more real.

I’m becoming more and more comfortable writing just to get better at writing. That is why I am starting a new draft of a novel I’ve been working on for at least four years, in a blank document with only an outline. That is why when one of my high school seniors said (in response to my sharing that I’d written a new outline over the weekend) “Is that the same novel you were working on our freshman year?” I proudly replied, “Yes, it is, actually!”

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.