What may seem crazy at first, may not be so crazy after all.

lizshine74by lizshine74

In A Room Of Your Own, On writing.

In Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life there is a section devoted to anecdotes of the strange means by which writers sometimes call their muses. In that section, there is a particularly bizarre story about a writer who writes with his coat on and his car keys in hand. He writes in snippets, always after rushing out the door and frantically running errands. Each time the pulse of rushing in and sitting down to write wears off, he heads out the door again. Or something like that. I may have messed up the details, but you get the idea.
I’ve laughed at this story many times while recalling it to friends. I mean, how crazy is that?
Today I had a wake up call.
It’s not so crazy if the writing is getting done, which for me lately, it is not.
There’s something to be said for sitting down to write when your heart is racing and you feel inspired. Today on my six mile run, the wisdom of this hit me and I resolved to run home and forestall everything else until after I had done some writing. I didn’t shower. I didn’t check my phone or my Facebook. I didn’t start dinner or kiss my fiance. I sat down and made my writing goal of editing a short story. And you know what?
I want to make a habit of running home to write. There’s something to it.

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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.