time travel
weekly story work exercise
If you’re new here, Story Work is the name of my current book-in-progress. It describes a process of reflection, reclaiming, and reimagining the stories of our lives. It involves looking at your life experiences as creative material that you have the power to shape. Paid subscribers receive Story Work exercises every Sunday night at 8 pm et.
Read on for some food for thought, workshop updates, and a preview of our weekly exercise.
Food for thought:
“What you’re doing as a writer is experiencing the world. You’re learning, and you’re gaining experiences, and you’re having emotions, and you’re working through them. That is your material.”
“If you have an artist palette, the colors on your palette are basically things that you’ve experienced.”
“There are certain things that I feel like I can speak to, because there’s something about me that I can understand in a deep way. That’s on my palette, and I can use that in an essay, or in a short story, or in a poem.”
“I feel like genre is just the form, but the medium and the matter that that you’re dealing with is the same, which is your lived experience.” — Jenny Xie, interviewed by The Creative Independent
Upcoming Workshops
This spring, I’m offering the first of four quarterly workshops on self-discovery and personal storytelling that will be included as part of the paid memberships, and open to non-members for a fee. Participants will come away with idea generation and drafting techniques for writing about their lived experiences.
Last week I included a poll to get a feel for what topics you’d like me to offer first. Based on those results, we’ll have The Writing to Heal method first in March. Details will be provided soon!
Interested in becoming a member?
If you want to write about your life as a creative practice, but you don’t know where to start, I offer different levels of support to help you make progress. Whether you write privately or publicly, as part of this community, you will gain insights on how to use writing to heal, grow, and connect. You can learn more about how to get involved here. I’m currently not open to new 1:1 or Mastermind clients, but you can sign up here to be notified when these offerings open up.
Alrighty then. Let’s get into this week’s Story Work exercise.
Time Travel
For the next few weeks our Story Work theme is Time Travel. This is a natural extension of our last theme Point of View. When doing the work of self-discovery and mining experiences for meaning, a writer goes on journeys through the past that cast light upon the present and shape the future.