Story Makers Show: This week’s podcast features former BWW student and now published author Lea Page in a great discussion of how to get published, how to revise, how to stay inspired, and even how to use rejection as part of your writing process! Check it out at http://StoryMakersShow.com or on iTunes or Stitcher.
I’m reading about the neurology of disorganization and its opposite in The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin. Our minds categorize. He suggests we work with our minds’ tendency toward category by creating spaces and times for the activities and things that matter to us. Classes are a way to categorize and organize your writing life. A place for everything and everything in its place—the basic dream of order. A class pulls your dream, wrinkled and crumb-covered, out of your backpack, smooths the page, slaps it to the fridge with a magnet. Now every time you go to pour some milk you are reminded of your dream. Slowly, things change. Instead of wanting to write, you are writing. It’s a wholly different feeling—the doing versus the wanting—joyous and rich.
A student recently counted the words she’s written on one particular project in three years of classes with me while she was finishing a different book. Just during class writing sessions (twice a week for her), she wrote 170,000 words of this side project! A long book—and they’re beautiful, powerful words, too. They’re first draft, of course; they’re the marble from which she can now carve her David. And there’s a class for the carving, too!
Classes are a way to say yes to yourself, to your writing, a way to counter the “to do” list that forgets the heart of your heart, the calendar that blocks no time for your purpose here on earth.
All of which is to say, if you’d like any of that, if you need any of that, join us. We have a few spots open and, come January, we’ll be back together, heads bent toward the task of realizing our dreams. We’d love to have you with us, doing the same.
Register here: https://bookwritingworld.com/winter-classes-2015/
I’d like to know when the next semester begins? I’ll be in Craft Class online, Thursday’s. I work full time and my new work schedule, with Thursdays off, won’t begin until January 21, 2016. It may be possible for me to ask for time off if the course begins earlier. I have to bid for time off or it wouldn’t matter.