You Are a Writer Because You Write

by Jean Selinger

Image: Paul / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It’s Friday afternoon and I am panicking. Marcie asked me a week ago to write a blog for the CWC website, something that would help other writers. AND send it to her by tomorrow. Holy Doodle!!!!! (Is that too many exclamation marks?) I have been busy for the last few months with work and a stay at home after surgery in April. I am not, at the moment, feeling at all creative. After this blog is finished, I am making cards for a couple of friends celebrating birthdays today. Now don’t go getting all “that’s creative” on me. Cards are something I do for the people I love, the same as taking pictures at parties and weddings. ‘Snaps of life, caught forever in 8X10” Sometimes I even put the pictures on the cards.

I also knit and crochet, wonderful pastimes, but not in the same bracket as writing “her knobby hands wove the crochet hook back and forth smooth as cream on the top of a milk pail”.

It’s not a wonderful day to be outside, so I am indoors, playing on my computer and wishing to God that I could write a poem, or have a short story hit me over the head.

The words above are commonly known as Morning Pages. You take five or ten minutes and write the first thing that pops into your head. The secret to this is to write. It doesn’t even have to make sense; it can be a wonderful inspiration of things to come. (Note the two quotes that if fixed creatively, could inspire poetry). While it probably won’t ever win the Pulitzer Prize, Morning pages can get you started on a writing adventure. And isn’t this what we all need. Whether you use, one of Julia Cameron’s help books, a box with tiny slips of paper emblazoned with words, or you see someone walking down the street and make up a story about where they have been or where they are going, it doesn’t matter. You are a writer because you write.

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Jean was born at a very early age, in Summerside, Prince Edward Island. She immigrated to Lower Canada in the early seventies and never looked back. One of her proudest accomplishments was being published in Legion Magazine. They published a story she wrote about her father in World War 2. Some of her poems are published and some not, but she enjoys writing them anyway.