A Sample Morning Write Practice
- What is before you to write today 10 min 7:10
Contemplate-Meditate
- Write 30 min 7:40
- Read Out Loud 10 min 7:50
- Revise 30 min 8:20
- Break 15 min 8:35
- Continue Morning Write 30 min 9:05
- Read Out Loud 10 min 9:15
- Revise & End Morning Write 5 min 9:30
- Name, Save, & Share (if it would delight you)
Self–Care: Make time to eat a healthily as you desire for yourself, drink water, coffee or tea, take a walk or go to the gym, find a great spot at home or at a library to write. Yes, take care of your family & work chores & obligations & preserve a daily writing practice time as a dedicated and secured time for your health and creative self.
Daily–Weekly–Biweekly Writing Practices
- Read critically in the genres that feed your writing
- Write critically about what you read. At least one double spaced page for each book you read.
- Attend virtual storytelling, readings and lectures
- Take virtual classes & workshops
- Send your work out into the world, yes, get your work published.
- Consume writing publications, such as, Poets and Writers, for writing opportunities, such as, virtual retreats, readings, lectures, and places to send your work for possible publication.
Create a Writing Practice in Community:
Continue to find writing partners and writing community
- Learn from, get and receive support for your writing and your writing self,
- Share your work, get your writing workshopped in environments that are maximally supportive of your writing and your creative self.
- Zoom, Skype, Phone, & Snail Mail
Where’s the Joy you ask?
It is in the going down into dreaming
In the just before coming to wakefulness
In the remembered sound or scent or voice or shape or movement that finds itself finely rendered on the page
In the child’s voice come to life or a mother’s or father or lovers voice
In something malevolent, just maybe, a voice or vision that refused to be seen and known before you created it on the page
In the perfect description of wind on water or dry lightning or the scent of tea cake and gardenias or the taste of ripe just picked strawberries or the sweat of a laborer or the quiet breathing of a sleeping child
In the listener or reader smiling in understanding, memory, connection or in gasp, as they see, hear, feel the delicious passion or danger or the terrible truth about to be revealed
In capturing a truth about a place, a time, a person, a people, a thing that mattered
In writing the perfect word or sentence or paragraph or chapter.
In being our writer selves….
In writing into that word, thought, emotion, time about what will happen next…..
Be in Writing Joy!
© Andrea Canaan, MSW, MFA
A Writer's Life 