Welcome to Litsy!

...Write every day, even if it's only a word. After putting pen to paper, you want to try to write something every day. set some targets...

Good writing practice is about discipline.

Make notes on your story, your character, your setting.

“....Good writing depends on practice, like sports, the more limbered up you are, the better you perform...the only way to...is to write. Get some material down on paper....Start off with what you had for tea, the last phone call you made, the color of your lover's eyes...Give yourself a subject and write about it, without stopping or correcting yourself, for five minutes. Then read it out for yourself

Writers start writing at different stages in life. For everyone who has 'always written', and started to learn the techniques of making their work audience worthy earlier on, there are those who don't start out until later in life. Perhaps they all had their confidence knocked out of them by the educational system, or their adult life since,

Writing down my dreams, whenever they seemed important for a great many years.
A friend of mine in France wrote a book about her dreams over a long period of time and called it Letters from the Night. That they are messages our unconscious sends us, ever elusive, ever-shifting, and yet at times, extraordinarily helpful. 🤓

The beginning of a voice of my own, when I eventually made it to the world of learning, of academia, where everyone seemed to know better than me, and I seemed to not be entitled to my own opinion, it was due to a long habit of diary writing that I could hang on to a sense of self.

Something whispered that whatever was valuable about me was who I was, I didn't need to dance to the world's tune.

Diaries -
“...A source of tactile and visual pleasure. I like the activity of writing, somewhat under threat during the computer age. I enjoy writing as an act, as a craft. Something material in which the whole body can be involved...“

“... are a trusted friend. Esp. at adolescence, I cud pour it out, rave and swear at the adults around me, satirize them in poems, or devise tragic tales of romantic passion, safe from prying and judgemental eyes.

I write in the same kind of exercise books I used as a child, at any given moment, I have a book on the go. I always have one with me, and soon each one gets filled up with what I'm thinking about, or descriptions of scenes, I've witnessed or made up, irresistible snatches of dialogue from scenes like bus stips and shops. Littke drawings too, the boks are my place to file things away

Go sit in a cafe, get an extra Large cup of coffee, and write for a few hours. When I lived by the sea, I would sit and write on the beach. In my writing class, one of the first exercises I ask them is to go sit in a cafe or a pub and write a good few convincing character sketches of the people they see around them.

The only way to overcome this problem is to write. Get some material down on paper. Start off with notes, fragments, and half-sentences. Until the stuttering stops, and you find yourself writing whole sentences, paragraphs, pages. Often the writer's own self-consciousness is about the act of writing itself. The first few miles will be a juddering, stop-start journey. Be prepared for this. You are engaging with something unfamiliar to you.

Think of your notebooks as a way of capturing things that go through your head. Think of them as yourself, your memory, and everything that you witness; all of it distilled. - Chapter 2

As I do enjoy dabbling in writing I thought I might give this book a try.