by Nancy Casey
Today, your writing will take the form of a letter. You can write it to a real or imaginary person, and you don’t have to mail it.
Pretend that you have just arrived at a Grand Hotel, a splendid vacation spot with marvelous amenities and superb convenience. Write a letter telling your friend how amazing, wonderful and perfect everything is.
Here’s the catch: all the details of the letter have to be details about your very own home and surroundings.
You can tell about the services, the entertainment, and the furnishings. You can tell what makes it comfortable and pleasant. In the spirit of making lemonade from lemons, you can describe challenges or discomforts in terms of the outstanding opportunities for growth that they present to you.
You can say anything you want, as long as it is positive to the point of bragging and describes something real and factual about your home and surroundings.
Begin to set up your page by drawing a large rectangle that makes the page have a frame around it that’s about an inch wide. The frame will be your drawing space. Your title will go in the frame, too. At the very top of the page, draw a long rectangle inside the frame that the title will fit into when it comes time to write it.
Write the date at the top of the writing space like you would for a letter, and begin with “Dear So-and-So”… using a person’s real name.
If ideas for bragging up your living space come to mind right away, begin writing. Every time you have to stop and think, don’t stop your pen from moving, just move over to the drawing space and begin decorating the frame. When you get another idea for writing, move over to the writing area and continue there.
Try not to ever pause completely. Always keep your pen moving in one part of the page or another. Either decorate the frame, or add to the letter. Can you do it? Sometimes it takes practice and concentration at first, but the reward is usually a deep calming inside your mind.
As you get down to the end of the writing part of the page, sign off the way you do when you write a letter. Read over your work. Make small changes if you need to. If you haven’t yet finished decorating the page’s frame, keep working on that until you are completely satisfied with the whole page.
When a title pops into your mind, write it down in the rectangle you have saved for it.
Here is one example of what someone’s page could look like.
Share your work by posting it as a comment below. You can type it in, or take a photo of it and upload the image.
Nancy Casey has lived in Latah County for many years. You can find more of her work here. She occasionally teaches a Write-For-You class at the Recovery Center and offers free online writing coaching for people in recovery. For information contact Nancy or the Latah Recovery Center
Latah Recovery Community Center, Inc. 