This blog is titled The Writing Life. In the early days of my New Jersey writing group, Scriveners, we said we’d have a go ‘round before we started writing, each writer sharing briefly what was going on in her life since we last met.
Now you know this is way too open-ended. Get six or seven women around a table and they are each going to share what’s going on, this could take … forever. So we limited it to two to three minutes each. But still some table sitters needed to share about their adult children, and their adult children’s children, and then their spouse, and finally perhaps circling round to what was going on with them.
So I got tough. Two to three minutes on your writing life. What had you done in the last week to further your writing? And justified, some writers still had to go through the kids, and kids’ kids, the spouse, and then self. ‘Tis the way of women. And they had a point.
All the people in my life influence my writing life. My writing life and my life life are sometimes mirror images. It’s almost one of those “I am Heathcliff” moments. The line between my writing life and life life is no line drawn in the sand. It is a wavering space like pulling a stick along the dock at Lake George. The line squiggled and widened. The ripples flowed out to the farther ends and the inside ripples meshed and bumped into each other.
And so it is with my writing life. I get an idea. I sometimes plunge in, sometimes hop around the idea like skipping stones on the Long Island Sound, sometimes draw a tentative line that has ripples going out and in until it’s smooth and… I am writing.
So it will be with my blogging. I’ll write in my web log. With the purpose of sharing about my writing/life. With the hope of connecting with other writers and their writing life.
