It was fantastic. I got myself back to what I started doing with writing in the first place. I was connecting with myself, digging into the thoughts I had on a daily basis to the point of either understanding them a little better or abandoning them to the page.
There wasn’t any room for fear or doubt. It was just about writing. It was about seeing language in an out pour. It was about finding a way to connect with the world (even if it would remain a personal notebook situation) without considering who I might offend or, worse, bore.
Plus, it got me to set up a creative space-time. It made my early af mornings available for focusing in on writing and nothing else. Well, okay. I may have spent thirty minutes here and there arranging a playlist or scrolling through a Twitter feed. And maybe more or less scandalous things happened as well. But I assure you, all of these things were in service of the writing.
The point is, there can and probably need to be chunks of time where nothing happens. It’s those blank spots that end up getting filled with something useful and satisfying.
For me, pushing myself to just write, in addition to a bunch of prose and, eventually, a poetry manuscript, brought me to this blog. It’s taken time to get the voice to where it is now (which is not necessarily where it will be in three months) and even longer to figure out what the hell a creative writing blog might be.
But here I am. Creating something.
So, I have here a creative space allotted to my decades long endeavor to sound cool and find myself around intelligent people. It is a space to grow in and branch out from. And that’s a pretty exciting place to be.
On that last note: What kinds of creative things do you do when you’ve been pulled away from it for a while? How do you get back into the artistic groove?
Dan Dorman 