Getting to Write: Guest Blog by Bree LeMaire

Getting my brain to transition into writing mode is a thousand mile trek. It’s wonderful and easier to escape into TV or a book. Venturing into my own story garden is easily avoided. One of the tricks I play on myself is to read books about writing, taking words of encouragement or direction as motivation.

I also collect short sayings about writing and note them in front of my journals. The first journal is my “grounding journal” or what’s going on in my non-writing life. The other is my journal for drafts, mind-maps, goals and assignments.

Here are three of my favorite sayings:

“I’m a writer, whether I write or not.” This saying hits me because I can still retain my identity as a writer. It means that I see the world through a writer’s eyes. As a nurse, I’d enter a patient’s room and see each patient through my medical knowledge, filtering what I saw into a myriad of known symptoms. Even today, I’ll see a person standing up very straight and it will register, ‘bad back.’ As a writer I have that same 6^th sense, automatically ingrained because that’s how I see my world, whether I’m writing or not. Next to me today, in the coffee shop is a couple, holding hands. She has an engagement ring. They talk in whispers.  He’s massaging her hand. There’s intimacy. What’s that about? And so on.

“Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.” This comes from a G.K. Chesterton quote but he used the word badly instead of poorly.  The saying gives me permission to get through that first draft. The first time out I’m no polished writer, nor am I any race horse so I have to start slow and rewrite a lot. My parents were both teachers who believed in ‘constructive criticism.’ Rather than improving my skills, I’d quit. It was a surprise to me that smooth prose was rewritten many times. Writing a piece poorly in the beginning gets me out of the gate.

“Think of writing as being like a shark who has to keep swimming or it will die.” (Alexandra Sokoloff) I never consider the immediacy of writing until I’ve had a few dry days without it. I just came back from a visit to see family and my writing fell by the wayside. Now, I feel like that dying shark. The only solution is to bring my writer self to the page and make that transition of doing what I know will sustain me. Time to hang onto the words that “only you can write your story.” (Elizabeth Stark)

About the author: Bree LeMaire lives in San Francisco. She is a founding member of the Book and is working on her second mystery novel, Murder in the Rehab Unit or just plain Rehab. When she talks of writing she says, “I have to get back into Rehab,” for incentive.