Kiss Your Frogs*

It happens to every writer: sloppy, rambling, unintelligible, boring writing that is going anywhere but where you want. It’s the frog-kissing phenomenon of creative writing and it happens to the best of us, even to seasoned pros. If you write at all, know that you’re going to produce some stuff that’s way to the left of good, lopsided and croaking on some withering lily pad.

First-draft writing doesn’t have to be good, it won’t always be good, and even when it is good, among the good will be some not-so-good. For many writers, understanding and accepting this has a powerfully freeing effect. Writing teacher and author Natalie Goldberg says, “You’re free to write the worst junk in America.” Anne Lamott also has a name for that rough stuff we all write. She calls it “shitty first drafts.” It’s the swampy, mucky stuff that holds little promise for happily-ever-after, and almost every writer experiences a day when muck is what gets written.

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Mining my Memoir and Other Reliquaries

I know. I know. A memoir is not actually a storehouse for relics such as sacred bones or castoff pieces of clothing—the stuff of saints and the holiest of holies. A memoir is a container for a story from a life. And not necessarily a holy life, except for the belief that all life is holy, even that of a sinner such as me.

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Falling in Love All Over Again

A couple of Thursday Writers* ago, my co-facilitator, Steve Montgomery gave us writers this prompt: “We fell in love again.” It’s taken from a poem by Ted Kooser, the first US Poet Laureate.

The idea of Thursday Writers is to write to the prompt, writing practice style—that is, go where the prompt takes you, write for a given amount of time (in this case, thirteen minutes) and when time’s up, read your writing aloud if you want to; no critique is given.

This is what I wrote from the prompt (some light editing for grammar, punctuation, etc):

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