Once upon a time, there lived an organized girl in a disorganized world. Armed with her calendar and a ballpoint pen, her smart phone, her laptop and sarcastic sense of humor she bravely ventured forth and raised her children, managed her household and wrote! Boy did she write: stories, and poems and even a novel, as well as little personal essays and thoughts about writing. All of these things she did while in car line, after soccer practice, in the early morning hours before her children woke, or in the late hours, after the kids were put to bed – and she attributed it all to the magic tools she possessed.
One Monday two years ago, an ugly complicated thing happened in her life, and the girl was robbed of her calendar and her writing, her laptop and more days than not, her sense of humor. Her house was left in a wreck and for the first time she wondered what to do. She attempted bravely to reconstruct what she had before, but after several months, she realized she could not. She simply couldn’t remember all of the words in the “correct” order that she had previously arranged them. She would daydream about a poem she had once worked on or a short story she had once started and then realized that those things were gone, they were in the hands of the thieves who took them from her. And they refused to return the things that they knew belonged to her. This made her very sad, and it slowed her writing down to a mere crawl and then to baby steps and then, for a while, to none at all.
But in the past two years, this girl has learned that she wasn’t without resources. She had wonderful friends (especially in the Book Writing World), and these friends knew the best games. They’ve taught her some – darts and hopscotch, to name a couple. Darts, in the figurative sense, as in “focusing” attention on a particular problem, coming up with an outline and throwing one’s energy into solving (or in this case, writing) that problem — like throwing a dart at a target. Hopscotch for the minds that cannot sit on a single problem, but enjoy working on multiple problems – an organized way to do more than one thing at once.
This fairy tale does not have an ending yet, but it has a path not unlike the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz. It is a journey, filled with art-a-day challenges and self-imposed deadlines for writing, darting back and forth between novels in progress and now, a nonfiction piece about the ugly complicated thing that happened two years ago, playing hopscotch with time and memory, trying to remember everything in the order that it happened so that later, no one who reads the account will ever forget.
All this to say that time waits for no one, and everyone who is interested in writing can write. All it takes is a few minutes of focused time, each and every day. And a desire to be heard. Take fifteen minutes for yourself today and write about something that interests you.