WRITING INTENTIONS

It started as a go-around with our writing intentions for the day/week. A dozen Eastside Tucson Writing Room writers each in our Zoom box were ready to share:

1 organizing her manuscript into chapters while prepping for “the 3rd winter of 2025” in one of our South Central states.

1 back to writing for 2 hours daily with break time- on a new computer!!

1 prepping for a Tucson pop-up event on women’s safety 

1 happy announcement of a newsletter review

1 finding a good lead in a box of old writing files

1 in contact with publishers for final book edits 

1 follow-up in contact with Thrive Global

1 new social media posts

1 prepping notes for a memoir writing class in NC

1 sharing information about a writing contest- a 53 word story.

1 lamenting her lack of discipline carrying out her intention to submit pieces for publication. And her antidote – submitting to the circled entries in Poets and Writers.

Do you feel the creativity swirling? Also 2 birthdays and 1 romantic anniversary.

INTENTIONS ARE INSPIRING

I added myself to that lack of discipline category. My creative writing has been “sparse.” I’ve done factual writing, reporting, writing sympathy cards and birthday cards. Snippets of creative ideas are in my journal, and on notes on my laptop with DO THIS across the top. Any actual writing of my next book, or next blog, or next essay? Nothing, nada, nil, zip, zero. But I keep showing up for the group, and for me.

I did share aloud – words from Robert Coles’ Lives of Moral Leadership about his interview in the 1960s with Ralph McGill, Pulitzer Prize winner and former editor of the Atlanta Constitution. McGill believed in writing not just to preach to the choir or to try to convert anybody, but to write for the “ordinary folks” and those who are “torn by mixed feelings and might be in need of whatever help they can get in sorting things out “ “People look to others for help in knowing what they should do with all the ideas that cross their minds.”

Reading is a huge component for my creative writing. 

READING LEADS TO THINKING 

The McGill interview got me thinking about why writers write, why I write. My zoom group today was like a box of matches to my pile of straw ideas. 

I don’t claim to write because I know everything or even to lament about “not knowing what I don’t know.” I write mostly because I love words and am curious. I write edu-entertainment. Sometimes my writing is humorous, sometimes serious, sometimes a how-to. Writers have helped me organize what I’m thinking. Sometimes folks have said my writing helped or inspired them.

If you’ve read some of my blogs, you know my mantra is “Words are Powerful.” Words can inspire, motivate, praise, affirm, create dreams and relationships. Words can also crush, humiliate, belittle, and depersonalize a person, a people, a relationship. I go for the words that can build people up. 

THINKING LEADS TO ACTION

Words are powerful and this is February, the love month. I submit to you some powerful words for February. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Ya gotta learn to laugh. It’s the way to true love. ~ John Travolta- Michael

Love is an excess of friendship. ~ Aristotle

If lots more of us loved each other, we’d solve lots more problems.  And then the world would be a gasser.  ~ Louis Armstrong

If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow. ~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

No partner in a love relationship … should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable. ~ May Sarton

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time. ~ Maya Angelou. (That’s one virus I don’t mind catching. ~ elm )

(And a final “love” play on words…)Time wounds all heels. ~ Jane Ace 

Thanks to my colleagues in today’s Eastside Tucson Writing Room – I accomplished creative writing today and am fired up for tomorrow. My slump is over. 

Ethel Lee-Miller blogs regularly about people, the power of words, and her writing life. She retired after 30 years of teaching, and semi-retired from coaching, and professional editing. Founder of the Eastside Tucson Writing Room based in Tucson AZ, she’s posted 100s of blogs, and is the author of Thinking of Miller Place, and Seedlings, Stories of Relationships. These days she writes to inspire, to connect with folks, teaching about the power of words, gather writers together, and for the pure enjoyment of it. Ethel enjoys teaching, speaking, and storytelling at Odyssey Storytelling, Artists Standing Strong Together, Tucson Tellers of  Tales Center for Spiritual Living Tucson, and anywhere there’s a mic or a Zoom room.