Online Beginning Writer’s Workshop

I want to write, but without a deadline or structure, my practice gets wiffly.  My journal gets used when life gets sucky. Good news is, life has been agreeable lately. Bad news is, I haven’t written as much. So, to encourage myself, I started this blog two months ago with a goal to post every day. It put a structure in front of me that helped me stay on the writing rails.

It also gave me a chance to practice my editing skills before hitting Publish. The editing made me realize I use a lot more waffle words than I realized. My inner editor has successfully learned to hurl words aside like ‘possibly’ and ‘it seems’ and ‘perhaps’ with wild abandon, until, that is, they are rightfully welcome. And I’ve learned that ‘that’ can so easily be cut without damaging a thing. The blogging has been good.

But I want to write a novel. Then I worry I don’t have any creative ideas. Then I think, maybe I do.  I just need to let go of my inner critic—The Judge—who can so easily denigrate and find fault, that the ideas are simply too frightened to peek out.

I decided I wanted to help myself along and signed up for an on-line writing program through our local community college. Called Beginning Writer’s Workshop, it kicked off last night with a couple of free-writing exercises and a discussion area for students to introduce themselves.

Good god!  There are 101 participants from around the country in this thing; completely surprised me. And invigorated me. The enthusiasm of my fellow writers was infectious. Much better than doing writing exercises alone from a book; feedback and interactive opportunities are definitely part of this gig.

I’m hopeful the class, the environment, the pace, the encouraging support and the structured exercises will help me find a way to free those frightened ideas and put them onto paper.

Looking forward to jamming down this road.  With a cup of coffee or glass of wine. Or both.

 

Daily Post-Prompt: Infect

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