I love to write on the computer. I love that the words go from somewhere behind my eyes down my neck to my arms and somehow magically come out the right (thank you Sister Typing Teacher) fingers on the screen. I’m a pretty good typist so it all feels very immediate. I read about people like Neil Gaiman and others who write longhand with beautiful fountain pens in journals of one sort or another and I think “that’s nice” but I’ll stick with typing for most of it, thank you very much. I used to do poetry in moleskines but these days even that’s mostly in digital form.

There was little info about what to bring for the workshop I went to this weekend and when I asked I was told “paper and pen”. Hmmm. Well, the computer often travels with me no matter what so it went into the bag along side the new yellow pad and extra sharpie pens.

At the beginning, Winter Miller told us to put away every thing else and that we would be writing, actually writing with a pen on actual paper. She had her reasons and she laid it all out for us. The part about having an immediate layer of rewrite during the transcribing process made total sense to me. But still… Seemed daunting to be… writing…

Imagine my surprise then when at the end of the first twenty minute writing period that I had three or four pages of thick writing. Then more exercises. More exercises. Thirty minutes of writing. More exercises. More writing.

I took the pad with me to writing group and flipped through the yellow pages covered with black scratches: look at what I did Saturday in workshop – all this WRITING. Nope, these aren’t notes. These words are writing prompts and exercises. Lots and lots of pages of writing.

Holy cow.

No excuses. Put the words, one after the other, on the page, be it paper or pixelated.