FIFTEEN
REGROUPING
DAY THREE.
An empty page marks DAY THREE of my 10-day writing challenge. After a flying start in the first two days where I surpassed my goal to write 2000 words, I hit a wall on the third day.
I know I tried. I know I typed at least the words DAY THREE. But then I let bad habits get the better of me. I failed to focus and allowed the critic in my head to speak up. I cannot remember the specific details of this day which goes to show that, if nothing else, I could have written about how I felt not being able to write. I could have tried to describe my frustration with the blank page, filling it in the process.
I could have told you whether I slept poorly or whether I felt that I did too much in the previous two days or whether the sun was shining so nicely that I didn’t want to be stuck behind my desk inside. I could have simply described the weather, what time I woke up and how I made it to my desk.
Incidentally, my space to write has been all over this house in Squamish where we have lived since September 2008, in different rooms, which is another topic I could have used to fill that blank page. Today, for example, my laptop and I are sitting at the dining table. The first spot I used to write in this house was in one of the three bedrooms upstairs that we had designated as my office. That room looks out over our street and the neighbours that have three dogs, an eight-year-old German shepherd named Tekaya and two seven-month-old Jack Russells named Bandit and Brandy. Their house backs onto a forest with great trails for mountain biking and walking our dog Luka who we adopted from the SPCA as I did this writing challenge in April 2009 (more about that later). It is because of Luka that we now typically walk the Summer’s Eve and Seven Stitches trails in that forest at least twice a week.
Our master bedroom faces south. It’s a large space with a bed, headboard and one chair I bought 20 years ago and was reupholstered by my parents. These days it also has Luka’s crate but it didn’t yet then.
The master bedroom’s big window receives the sun as soon as it tops the mountain range around the Stawamus Chief, the world’s second-largest granite monolith, of which we see glimpses through the high trees in our backyard. I love the view. In front of this window is where I placed a small desk and wrote most of the 20,000 words that became the manuscript for this book.
You can write about the fact that you feel you have nothing to say and before you know it you have 450 words that are worth reading. This chapter is a case in point. You may rewrite or even scrap them in the revision processes later but you should never need to leave your desk without having written.
Exercise: Pick a seemingly mundane topic, such as today’s weather, the view outside the window closest to you, your desk or your office and describe it in detail. Details are essential. They show your unique viewpoint. Everything is worth writing about. Pick any of the above topics and describe anything and everything about of it. If that leads you to another topic or story, follow it and keep writing.
Copyright © by Margreet Dietz
