Category: Write for You Blog

by Nancy Casey

When you picture a lake in your mind, what do you see? Is it cool, clear water you can dive into on a hot day? Skanky, muddy water than an alligator might pop out of? Is there sky? Boats? Fish?

Let your mind roam around the idea of a lake while you set up your page.

Slowly draw a line across the top of the page where your title will go. You could also set aside some space for illustration or doodles, or make a decorative border along the edges. Take some time with the setup so that your mind empties and relaxes so ideas can flow in.

You might recall a lake that you have visited at one time or another. Or maybe a lake that you have seen in movies or heard about in stories. Maybe you’ll suddenly remember a lake from a dream. You could also make up a lake entirely from your imagination.

Begin by describing or naming the lake, and then add some details. Maybe you have a story to tell about it. Or a memory of people and another time. Perhaps you have things to say about the mood that the lake puts you in.

Maybe your lake isn’t a lake full of water. Some people think of emotions as a lake. Have you ever had to swim through a situation that felt like a lake to you? Perhaps there is a time or a season that you can recall that seems a little bit like a lake when you look back.

However you imagine a lake, write whatever comes to mind about it. If you write down everything you want to about one lake and still have room on the page, write about another one.

Eventually you page will be full. Go back and read over your work. Maybe you will want to draw on it, too.

Do your ideas form any kind of a pattern? Do they seem to be about a bigger idea that you hadn’t really planned on writing about? If they do, maybe you can use that insight to think up a title. If they don’t, make up some kind of a title anyway and write it at the top of the page.

Put your initials or a signature on the page, too. And write the date on it. Here is an example of what someone could write.

You can 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.

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Nancy Casey has lived in Latah County for many years. You can find more of her work here. If you would like some help or encouragement with any kind of writing project, contact Nancy or the Latah Recovery Center.

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Raised by God: The Autobiography of Patricia Clayton is a new book that grew out of the Write For You program at LRC. It is the story of a person making herself new after years of addiction and trauma.

by Nancy Casey

What’s going to happen — or not happen — this summer? In your writing today make some predictions.

Think about the upcoming summer as you set up your page. Some things are certain. Warm weather, for instance. Maybe you have plans. Perhaps there are aspects of summer that you dislike and you do your best to avoid them.

Set up your page by first drawing a line across the top where your title will go. Next divide the page into three relatively equal parts. Label one part “Probably.” Label the other two “Maybe” and “Definitely Not.” Set aside some space for drawing or decoration if that’s your thing.

In the “Probably” section, write about the things that you are pretty certain are going to happen. These could include events you have already planned, things that happen every summer, or even things that happen every month of the year.

Under “Maybe” write about summer events or occurrences that are pretty likely, but might change. Maybe you have vague plans or plans that require you to count on something that is out of your control. Perhaps there are things you hope will happen but you aren’t sure about them yet.

You are also probably counting on certain things not happening this summer. Are there types of activities or popular summer foods that you always stay away from? Is there anything you wish would happen, but you are certain it won’t? Anything you have organized your life around avoiding? These are the kinds of things you would record under “Definitely Not.”

Fill up the page any way that you like. You can write lists, or write about a few things in detail. You can fill one section at a time, or you can skip around. Doodle or draw when you can’t think of what to write next, and then start writing again when an idea comes to you.

When you have filled up the page, look back over your work. Make small corrections or additions if you think they are needed.

Do your ideas form any kind of a pattern? Do they seem to be about a bigger idea that you hadn’t really planned on writing about? If they do, maybe you can use that insight to think up a title. If they don’t, make up some kind of a title anyway and write it at the top of the page.

Put your initials or a signature on the page, too. And write the date on it. Here is an example of what someone could write.

You can 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.

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Nancy Casey has lived in Latah County for many years. You can find more of her work here. If you would like some help or encouragement with any kind of writing project, contact Nancy or the Latah Recovery Center.

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Raised by God: The Autobiography of Patricia Clayton is a new book that grew out of the Write For You program at LRC. It is the story of a person making herself new after years of addiction and trauma.

by Nancy Casey

What do you do when you don’t like the weather? Write about that today.

Think about the types of weather that you don’t like—and why—as you set up your page to get started.

Draw a line at the top of the page where your title will go. Set aside some space for illustration if you like. You can always draw or doodle while you wait for ideas to come to mind.

Begin by describing a type of weather that you don’t like. You might want to record its worst qualities. Then focus on how you respond to it.

Are you a complainer? You could write down some of the phrases you most often use to decry what Nature has served up.

Do you have a practical response? Changing your shoes, hat, or coat, for instance, or using special gear that will keep you comfortable.

Will a pep talk help you out? Do you sometimes encourage yourself to chin up or tough it out? What can you tell yourself to help yourself not mind the weather so much?

Maybe your dislike of the weather will cause you to alter or postpone plans. What kinds of weather makes that happen? What types of plans can get upended?

Have you ever disliked the weather so much that you moved to a different place? Or considered it?

Fill a page with your observations about how you react when the weather displeases you.

Afterward, look back over your work. Make small corrections or changes if they are needed. Add illustration or decoration if you like.

Do your ideas form any kind of a pattern? Do they seem to be about a bigger idea that you hadn’t really planned on writing about? If they do, maybe you can use that insight to think up a title. If they don’t, make up some kind of a title anyway and write it at the top of the page.

Put your initials or a signature on the page, too. And write the date on it. Here is an example of what someone could write.

You can 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.

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Nancy Casey has lived in Latah County for many years. You can find more of her work here. If you would like some help or encouragement with any kind of writing project, contact Nancy or the Latah Recovery Center.

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Raised by God: The Autobiography of Patricia Clayton is a new book that grew out of the Write For You program at LRC. It is the story of a person making herself new after years of addiction and trauma.

by Nancy Casey

Every experience is made up of a collection of smaller experiences. That’s true of a vacation, a trip to the dentist, or eating lunch. It’s true of parenthood, adolescence, planting a garden, or washing a car. It’s never just one thing.

Think about an experience you’ve had in your life. Major, minor, recent, long ago—it doesn’t matter. It could even be an experience that only happened in your imagination. Think about all the parts of that experience, all the mini-experiences inside the original one.

Of all of those mini-experiences, which one was the best? Answer that question with a sentence that begins, “The best part of…”

Set up your page: draw a line at the top of the page where your title will go. Set aside some space for illustration if you like. Get yourself going with drawing or doodling if that’s your thing.

Think about how odd it is that taking note of the best mini-experience inside a larger one doesn’t have anything to do with whether the larger experience was a good one or a bad one. In addition, the best mini-experience might be a pretty good one, but the “best” can also turn out to be the least-worst of the collection.

As you write, mention the larger experience, then devote all your writing energy to describing the mini-experience. You might write something like, “The best part of that meeting was the snacks.” You wouldn’t say anything more about the meeting, but you could continue and describe all the snacks and your experience of them. You might decide to leave that idea and think about a different experience and its best part.

Maybe you’d write,  “The best part of my friend’s visit was when we laughed.” If you want to write more, write about what the laughing was like and what was so funny, but don’t say anything more about the friend’s visit.

Fill your page with descriptions of one or more “best parts.” Then look back over your work. Add illustration or decoration if you like.

Do your ideas form any kind of a pattern? Do they seem to be about a bigger idea that you hadn’t really planned on writing about? If they do, maybe you can use that insight to think up a title. If they don’t, make up some kind of a title anyway and write it at the top of the page.

Put your initials or a signature on the page, too. And write the date on it. Here is an example of what someone could write.

You can 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.

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Nancy Casey has lived in Latah County for many years. You can find more of her work here. If you would like some help or encouragement with any kind of writing project, contact Nancy or the Latah Recovery Center.

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Raised by God: The Autobiography of Patricia Clayton is a new book that grew out of the Write For You program at LRC. It is the story of a person making herself new after years of addiction and trauma.

by Nancy Casey

We get up every day and make decisions all day. Some of them are life-changing. Some of them are life-complicating. Some of them are so small and ordinary that we barely notice that we’ve made them.

Today, write about some of the decisions you have made.

As you organize yourself to write, think about your life in terms of decisions. Gather your materials—whichever ones you decide to use. Draw a line across the top of a blank sheet of paper where your title will go. Set aside some drawing or doodling space if you decide to do so.

As soon as an idea comes into your mind, write down some words about it.

If you have made a decision that turned out to be very important in your life, you might decide to fill up the page by telling the whole story of it.

Any time you have a choice about what you are going to do next, you make a decision. Even if the decision is the same one you have already made thousands of times. You could write about all of the decisions you have made since this day began.

Life-complicating decisions are usually a mixed bag of knowledge and hope, with a few surprises tossed in. You could write about the factors that went into a decision that took you down difficult or unexpected paths.

You can write about a decision without saying what the decision was. To do that, you might write something like, “That time I decided what to do about…” Or you could describe the clothes you were wearing, where you were and what you were looking at when you made a certain decision. Another possibility would be to write about all the consequences of the decision.

Once your page is full, go back through your work. Does it need illustration or decoration? You decide.

Do your ideas form any kind of a pattern? Do they seem to be about a bigger idea that you hadn’t really planned on writing about? If they do, maybe you can use that insight to decide on a title. If they don’t, make up some kind of a title anyway and write it at the top of the page.

Put your initials or a signature on the page, too. And write the date on it. Here is an example of what someone could write.

You can 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.

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Nancy Casey has lived in Latah County for many years. You can find more of her work here. If you would like some help or encouragement with any kind of writing project, contact Nancy or the Latah Recovery Center.

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Raised by God: The Autobiography of Patricia Clayton is a new book that grew out of the Write For You program at LRC. It is the story of a person making herself new after years of addiction and trauma.

by Nancy Casey

Today in your writing, let your imagination float away to a different world. Write about anything you like, as long as it hasn’t happened.

As you set up your page, think about how the whole universe of what hasn’t happened is so much more vast than the map of everything that actually has happened.

Draw a line at the top of the page where your title will go. Set aside some space for illustration if you like. You can always draw or doodle while you wait for a writing idea to come to mind.

One category of things that haven’t happened consists of everything you imagine happening later today. Or next year.

Another category: things that haven’t happened because they are against the laws of physics and the natural world as we know it. Rocks sprouting fingers, for instance, or a neutron star moving into the house next door.

Somewhere in the middle of those two categories are all the things that might happen. There are those that probably will, and those that probably won’t. Some you wish will indeed happen and others you dread.

What about all of the things that you can’t even imagine happening? It’s pretty hard to write about them! Can you draw any of them?

When you have filled up the page with events that haven’t occurred, look back over your work. Add illustration or decoration if you like.

Do your ideas form any kind of a pattern? Do they seem to be about a bigger idea that you hadn’t really planned on writing about? If they do, maybe you can use that insight to think up a title. If they don’t, make up some kind of a title anyway and write it at the top of the page.

Put your initials or a signature on the page, too. And write the date on it. Here is an example of what someone could write.

You can 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.

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Nancy Casey has lived in Latah County for many years. You can find more of her work here. If you would like some help or encouragement with any kind of writing project, contact Nancy or the Latah Recovery Center.

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Raised by God: The Autobiography of Patricia Clayton is a new book that grew out of the Write For You program at LRC. It is the story of a person making herself new after years of addiction and trauma.

by Nancy Casey

Tradition has it that we must emerge from the holiday season with a resolution or two that will make the year ahead better for us in some way. Very often, by the second week in January, those resolutions exist only in memory.

What if, instead of (or along with) organizing something new into our lives, we celebrated all that is new already? As you set yourself up to write a page, consider your possessions, your surroundings, and your attitude. Ask yourself, What’s new?

Think about your most recent shopping—whether in person or online. The fruits of that endeavor will be new to you.

Did anything new come your way over the holidays? Maybe a gift. Maybe a new friend?

Is there anything that you think of as “new,” even though it’s been present in your life for a long time?

Have you tried anything new lately? Think about places you have gone and foods you have eaten. Have external factors changed your routine so that you have new habits, whether you want them or not?

Attitudes might change slowly, but once they do, something about you is “new.” Is there some aspect of your approach to life that is different from a month, a year, or a decade ago? What’s new about it? What does this change mean to you?

Newness and change don’t always bring us joy. Perhaps there is a new aspect to your life, but you like the old version better. You could write about that.

Maybe your writing will come out resembling a list. Or maybe you have a whole big story to tell about something that’s new to you—how it came about, what the “old” was like, and what the change represents.

As you ponder the newness of the new, draw a line at the top of the page where your title will go. Set aside some space for illustration if you like. Start drawing or doodling in writing ideas don’t come to you right away. (Whatever you do to the page will make it “new.”)

As soon as you get an idea, begin writing about it. If you don’t think the idea is very good, write about it anyway. Maybe it will turn into a good one. Maybe a better idea will crowd it out as soon as you start writing and you can write about that idea next.

When you have filled up the page, look back over your work. Add illustration or decoration if you like.

Do your ideas form any kind of a pattern? Do they seem to be about a bigger idea that you hadn’t really planned on writing about? If they do, maybe you can use that insight to think up a title. If they don’t, make up some kind of a title anyway and write it at the top of the page.

Put your initials or a signature on the page, too. And write the date on it. Here is an example of what someone could write.

You can 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.

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Raised by God: The Autobiography of Patricia Clayton is a new book that grew out of the Write For You program at LRC. It is the story of a person making herself new after years of addiction and trauma.

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Nancy Casey has lived in Latah County for many years. You can find more of her work here. If you would like some help or encouragement with any kind of writing project, contact Nancy or the Latah Recovery Center.

It’s pretty exciting to see your name on the cover of a book, so imagine the excitement that Trish Clayton is feeling these days. Raised by God: The Autobiography of Patricia Clayton was published this month.

Trish and I met through the Write for You program at the Latah Recovery Center. In 2020 she started each day by writing down a story from her life, not a really long story, maybe a couple of pages at most. Two years and a lot of hard work later, Trish’s life story, Raised by God, is a book that anyone can buy on Amazon.

It begins with her birth and tells a story of intergenerational trauma, multiple addictions, suicide attempts, repeated relapses, and two decades (and counting!) of recovery and sobriety.

The back of the book says, “This is an account of her ride to the bottom and the decades-long process of recovering her life, her sanity, and her relationship with God.”

This is an interesting–and perhaps triggering–read for anyone who has been affected by family trauma and addiction.

For people who want to be more informed about addiction and recovery, Trish’s up-close and personal account shows how nobody decides to become an addict because they think it’s a good idea. She takes us through the thought processes that caused her to relapse over and over. Her story explains how and why it took her so long to “learn what she needed to learn.”

Congratulations, Trish, for the book, but also for your recovery, your life, and your inspiration.

Trish appeared on Recovery Radio in June of 2020. You can listen to that interview here.

In January, Trish and I will be organizing events like book signings and other presentations, so stay tuned for that.

Write for You will be offline for the month of December. Look for a return of weekly writing prompts in January.

Wishing everyone a happy and interesting holiday season.

If you are casting about for a New Year’s resolution, remember this: Writing 30 pages on a Saturday will change your weekend, but writing one page a day will change your life.

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Nancy Casey has lived in Latah County for many years. You can find more of her work here. If you would like some help or encouragement with any kind of writing project, contact Nancy or the Latah Recovery Center.