WRITER AND PROTAGONIST
in every area, every day!
Being the writer and protagonist of your own life happens when you use writing as a tool, rather than seeing it as just another task.
Writing was never important to me until I was 35, when I started reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I’ve always felt that my mind talked too much, chewing things over like cows while they eat, and I always saw that as a good thing, except for the times when that endless thinking wasn’t about anything constructive, but rather DESTRUCTIVE.
As I grew up, this chatter in my head became more and more focused on WORRIES rather than on entertaining or constructive ideas. It centered on negative topics, and the fun stuff couldn’t find room again, even though every so often that creative Fabián would show up with ideas and proposals that were worth developing at length!
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But you know how it goes: work, commitments, certain duties, even unexpected things always end up taking your time and your attention. On top of that, with mobile devices our ability to focus has shrunk enormously, which makes it even harder to stay on the same subject for more than 5–10 minutes.
But writing, the way it’s done, tends to cancel out those problems.
- Because it’s linear, it doesn’t allow jumping from one topic to another, like browsers do, or between different apps.
- Writing by hand or on a typewriter doesn’t allow major corrections. What you wrote stays, and if you cover it with correction fluid, fine, but you can’t cover a whole page without it being a silly thing to do. What’s done is done.
- Writing takes time. Putting an idea down letter by letter has a slower rhythm than the one computers have accustomed us to, and that’s the key.
Picking up a pencil and starting to write, typing on your typewriter, is similar to painting. You start with a blank canvas, and at first your opening lines look like a mistake, but you keep going, there’s no alternative, because if it’s wrong, well, next time will be better.
But as you keep going, you start putting something together, building it, with a rhythm that feels more comfortable and more natural with every passing minute, and the mind flows like a little stream, and thinking becomes inevitable!
It’s a deep connection between mind and body, and it also stays on the page, where you can see it again and understand it.
Now all that’s left is to choose. What do we talk about now? What things have been going around in my head that I haven’t known how to listen to? Or to develop? It can be good or bad, but sometimes it’s good to listen to the bad, to let it breathe so you can resolve it, or just get it out of your system, before exploring the things that make you want to live. . . .
Writing is an AMAZING tool!
