This shit takes practice.

lizshine74by lizshine74

In On writing.

Today, I got mixed up on carpooling details and missed my weekly critique group meeting. I walked all the way downtown to make the car pool ( a couple of miles), so once down there, I couldn’t see the sense in leaving without having done some writing.
The fact is, I was headed off to critique again without having written much new since we’d last met.
I’m still here, writing, and I wrote two new pages on a short story that I’m as of now quite proud of. And it occurs to me in this moment one of the things that keeps me from writing every day: the baggage I bring to the page. The barrage of insults I hurl at myself every time I sit down to write. There is no denying the fact that those insults gain strength the less often I persist in sitting down to put word on the page.
I’m reminded now of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and her advice to write all the shit that is keeping you from writing down, put it in a jar, and set it aside while you write.  Whether you use an actual jar or not, I see right now just how necessary this advice is, just how pervasive the self sabotage that keeps us from writing at all can be.
This shit takes practice. One has to do it every day if one wants to be any good at it.
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.