Day 18: Writing from snippets

Rain or Sun!

I am sitting in my car on the top of a parking building. There are trees peering over the top edge of the lot with bright yellow leaves. The rain and sun exchange places every few minutes.One creating a quiet glow of fall color. The other making loud droplets of rain on the hood of the car.

The wind is gentle and cool but no hint of the harsh cold that will be here in a few weeks. We are blessed with glorious autumn weather. These are the days that make Minnesota a place you want to live. There are comfortable day temperatures with cooling nights -perfect for sleeping.

__________

These two paragraphs were written a couple of falls ago – a blog post started but never finished. Not sure what happened but I found it in my drafts file today. What a lovely beginning to a piece. It helps me remember why I live in this state. It also reminds me as a writer to save even the little scraps of writing.

It is so easy to start then throw away little bits of writing. So often they seem like just a group of words going no where. I have been delighted that many of these little snips can get turned into lovely posts years later.

The last two posts I did (The Lunch Box Series) were also sitting in my drafts file with a title and three or four phrases –  no sentence, no paragraphs just a few quick notes to remind me of a memory I had. Those place holders were started two years ago before the March Challenge. They were a back up in case I ran out of things to write about. I never used them last year.

This year they had an appeal as I reviewed them and so I wrote the posts.

This is the time in a month long writing challenge that it is great to go back into the writing notebooks, or the draft files and see what is lurking there.

Now is when it gets hard. We have written for 17 days. The ideas begin to repeat themselves and we wonder do we have more to write. The voice in our head says – “I can’t write about one more snow storm and the plants in the basement are not growing fast enough to share another post. I have nothing to say. There is nothing new happening in my life so what am I to do!!???”                                ** see note below

This is where those little scraps of paper, the writing journal, notes from workshops or books on how to write come in really handy. Take a few minutes today to review some of those notes, draft files and hand written pieces. You will be surprised what you find there. Your writing muscle is activated and now those few words will be ripe for picking through and using to start a new post. Enjoy the treasure hunt for words and ideas!

Happy Writing for the next few weeks! 

 

**    (Thinking the plants are slow growing and nothing to say – there is new news –  garden update is the tomato plants have sprouted under the lights!  more on that this week. See there are posts hiding all over the place.)