Month: January 2016

Slow-cooking a First Draft

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“Go slowly. Love your story. It will wait for you.”                                                                                              -Allan G. Hunter Two years ago I began writing posts in this blog about my attempts to write a first draft. Those attempts resulted in a few dozen pages which are stashed in a shelf together with all the journals I had filled up through the years. Back then, I grabbed a notebook and pen after deciding to join a 5-pages a day writing challenge, and then a one-page a day challenge.  Both were supposed to culminate in a first draft in four to six months. Both times, I managed to write regularly for several  weeks then dropped out of the challenges because both times I didn’t really know what to write about.  Now that I am trying again for the third time, I realized that deciding …

From Blogging to Writing a First Draft

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When I started this blog on April 1, 2013, it didn’t occur to me that it was April Fool’s day because I was so determined to create a blog focused on writing. Prior to this blog, I had another one, where I wrote about various things. I changed the name of that blog several times over the course of two years because I was not sure what I wanted to write about. I finally closed that blog after I realized that what I really wanted to do was to learn how to write again – and differently this time around.  I decided to blog about my writing journey as a way of forcing myself to keep on learning about writing even as I continued to work as an energy therapist. It wasn’t hard to think of things to write. I simply put on the same thinking cap I used when I worked as a feature writer. Joining blogging events also helped me stay on the blogging track and learn from other bloggers. The more I blogged, the more I …