In the News

by Nancy Casey

Today you will be writing about something that is large in your life. It can be an idea, an event or a person. Maybe it’s a pet, a place, or a hobby.
How do you tell if something is large in your life?
Things that are large in your life often carry an emotional charge. Has something made you feel angry or upset lately? What gets you excited? What is deeply satisfying to you? What is making you feel the way you feel right now?
The large things in our lives take up our time. What do you spend your time doing, thinking about, watching or listening to? Who talks to you? Who needs you? Who ignores you? Who and what do you take the time to avoid?
Is there something that you wish other people understood? Is there something you wish you understood?
When you get to thinking about it, there are probably a zillion things that are large in your life. One thing that they will all have in common is that it’s hard to decide where to start when you are going to write about it.
After you have decided what to write about, don’t think about where to start, just write down some information. Start anywhere. Anywhere, that is, except the beginning. Plop yourself into the middle of this large thing in your life and write down one brief thing about it. If the first thing you write turns out not to be brief, that’s fine.
Once you’ve written something, start a new line and write the words, “And another thing…” Now write down some more information about this large thing in your life. When that’s done, skip to a new line, write “And another thing…” and describe a different detail from this whole big thing you are trying to write about.
Keep doing that. Don’t skip the actual writing of the words, “And another thing” because that’s the interval when your mind relaxes and lets an interesting idea bubble up. Don’t worry about the order in which things come out. If everything is all scrambled up, it doesn’t really matter. You can always put things in the right order later if you felt like it.
At the end of your writing, give the page a title and be sure to put the date on it. Here’s an example of the kind of thing you might write.
Repeat this exercise a few times throughout the week. You can choose to return to the same topic over and over again and probably surprise yourself by how much there is to say. That’s because the things that are large in our lives are complex and touch many aspects of our lives that are important to us.
When you repeat the exercise, you could also choose to write about a different topic each time. At any moment, each one of us has many different things that are large in our lives. If you write about several of them, you might begin to see how they are connected. Or maybe you’ll discover that they are at odds with each other.
Perhaps you will discover another thing altogether. Such a thing would probably turn out to be large.

Nancy Casey teaches writing classes at the Recovery Center on Thursdays. Check the calendar for classes and times. All are welcome. She coordinates Recovery Radio, which airs on KRFP 90.3 FM in Moscow Thursdays at 1:05 PM. Recovery Radio needs on-air and off-air volunteers. Call the Recovery Center 208-883-1045 or email latahrecoverycenter@gmail.com for more information.

by Nancy Casey

If you have been following this blog since it began the first week in January, and if you have been making the pages that the blog suggests, you have amassed a sizeable pile of work. Now that a half a year has gone by, it’s a good time to take a look at all of it and think about what you have been doing.

Settle in and read through your pages. Take a closer look at what you have done.  Note the different kinds of pages you have made.  Some are lists, some are paragraphs, some have illustrations.  Do you like the looks of some better than others? Do you remember writing them all?

If you began in January, it was wintertime.  Now it is summer.  Do you find your writing reflects the change of season?  Even if you haven’t written specifically about the weather, does reading what you wrote six months ago make you recall the different season?  What else does your writing make you remember?

Check to see that all of the pages have titles.  If any are missing, add them in.  What makes a good title? Consider making a Table of Contents that has the list of all the titles.  You can then read it like it is a poem.

Recall that the goal of a writing practice is to bring the act of writing regularly into your life and accept whatever improvements that brings to you.  You can’t know ahead of time what those improvements will be.  Maybe your spelling or grammar will get better.  Maybe writing will help you think more clearly.  The moments of focus that writing requires can be a benefit.  Perhaps your writing practice will make it easier to write other things.  Perhaps you will take great pleasure in the written record you have produced.  What do you think you have gotten out of your writing practice so far?

Have you been writing “about” something?  How is that going?  Sometimes we choose a topic and decide to write about that.  Other times, the topic pops up in the writing itself.  Most of the time, it’s probably a combination of both.  Occasionally you can notice that a piece of writing causes you to recall a whole host of details that weren’t written down.  What would be a good title for this sheaf of pages?

After you have studied your work for a while and noticed as many things as you can about it, write yourself a pep talk for the coming months of your writing practice.  It will be a pep talk in two parts.  Write it as though you are talking to yourself.

1.      Describe everything that you like about the work that you have done.  Don’t say a single negative thing about it.

2.      Based on what you wrote in the first part, make suggestions to yourself about what to do more of.  Don’t suggest anything because you think it will be “good for you.”  Only suggest things that you know that you will like and remind yourself why you will like them.

Here is an example of what you might write for a pep talk.  Make sure you have put the date on it.  Don’t forget to give it a title.

The season has shifted to summer, and in another six months it will be winter.  Each day is an opportunity to work a little bit on your writing practice.  If you do, you won’t be sorry.

Nancy Casey teaches writing classes at the Recovery Center on Thursdays.  Check the calendar for classes and times.  All are welcome.  She coordinates Recovery Radio, which airs on KRFP 90.3 FM in Moscow Thursdays at 1:05 PM. Recovery Radio needs on-air and off-air volunteers.  Call the Recovery Center  208-883-1045 or email latahrecoverycenter@gmail.com for more information.

by Nancy Casey

Write a sentence.  Any sentence at all.  Ten words or so. A sentence from your life, your week or your imagination.  Maybe you’d prefer to pluck a sentence from something you wrote earlier. Or something that you heard, or read, or just plain made up.  The only requirement is that the sentence is interesting to you somehow.  Write it anywhere on the page.

Draw a box around your sentence.

Pick out an interesting word or little group of words from your sentence.  Draw a box around that.

Here’s the tricky part.  You must draw a line that leads from the little box around your word all the way out into somewhere in the big blank space on the paper. As soon as you start drawing that line, though, it is going to bump into the edge of the bigger box that you drew around the whole sentence.  Don’t bump that line, hop over it.  To do that, you must draw your line like a little bridge.  Make it into a little underpass.  Or an overpass.

This might make more sense if you look at an example.  Think of it as though the word in the little box is escaping from the sentence in the big box.

For the next step, you will write a sentence that uses the “escaped word” somewhere in the big white space on the page.  Draw a box (or a circle) around the new sentence.  Think about it and find a word or phrase that wants to escape from the new sentence.  Draw a box (or some kind of shape) around that. Then draw the line (or road) that leads it out of the box.  But don’t forget to make a little bump, some kind of a bridge that hops over the edge of the bigger box.

And then just keep on going.  You don’t have to do everything in perfect order.  Sometimes two different words will want to escape from the box by two different routes.  All you have to do is keep pulling words out of the sentences in the big boxes and use them to write new sentences for new boxes

It won’t be long before you have filled up the whole page.

 Don’t forget to mark the date and give your page a title. 

Nancy Casey teaches writing classes at the Recovery Center on Thursdays.  Check the calendar for classes and times.  All are welcome.  She coordinates Recovery Radio, which airs on KRFP 90.3 FM in Moscow Thursdays at 1:05 PM. Recovery Radio needs on-air and off-air volunteers.  Call the Recovery Center  208-883-1045 or email latahrecoverycenter@gmail.com for more information.

by Nancy Casey

Make a list of everything that you want.  Make you list as long as you can.  Go for quantity, not quality.  Leave a little bit of space between each thing you write down.

Don’t skimp.  You don’t have to figure out how to get the things on your list.  They don’t even have to be possible.  You only have to want them.  For at least as long as it takes to write them down.

Do you want to be taller, smaller, healthier, more relaxed, or less allergic to pine pollen? Do you want to be able to dance the rhumba, use Excel, walk to a mountaintop, or fly?  Do you want breakfast, a skateboard, new shoes or grandchildren? What do you want to change?  What do you want to stay the same?

After each item on your list, write the word “because.”  Then explain why you want what you want.  You don’t need a “good” reason, just a reason.  Nobody needs to read this except you.

We get a lot of messages telling us we want the wrong things.  We’re not supposed to want things that are bad for our health or that help destroy the planet.  We’re warned to be “realistic” about our wants, lest we end up disappointed, or worse.  And of course we’re not supposed to want things that have a negative effect on other people.

These messages are wrong.  We want what we want.  The only thing that’s truly silly to want is to want to want something you don’t want.

Our wants come from our deepest self, not from our logical mind.  By the time they do arrive in our logical mind and we turn them into language, they are already pretty scrambled.  If we reject those scrambled ideas out of hand, those wants just keep rumbling beneath the surface like bad digestion, trying to create opportunities to snag our attention.

By paying attention to what we want, we understand who we are.  Our wants and desires are like a navigation system.  We lean in their direction the way a plant leans towards the light. 

A thousand scrambled and contradictory wants will make our actions scrambled and contradictory.  But the want-generator inside our self doesn’t care, it just wants.  When we get what we want, it wants something else.  When we don’t get what we want, it either forgets or turns up the juice and wants it even more.

In other words, we can’t control our wants, we can only try to make sense of them.  The wants come from our deep self.  The sense comes from our logical minds.  The self doesn’t obey orders to want or not-want, but it does notice what the logical mind concludes. The self also strives for harmony, so when the logical mind notices contradictions or impossibilities, the self takes note, even when it pretends not to.

That’s where the list comes in.  Go ahead, let your self want its heart out.  Cut loose and have a veritable want-a-thon.  Be serious.  Be unrealistic.  Be ridiculous.  Make the list every day for a week.  “Today I want…, because…” Write that sentence over and over and enjoy what comes up.  All those wants are in there, and the simple act of writing them down can help you get better acquainted with the true you that’s inside of you.

You won’t end up wanting fewer things, or “better” things, but you will achieve more and more clarity about which wants to chuckle over and which ones to act upon.

ßNancy Casey teaches writing classes at the Recovery Center on Thursdays.  Check the calendar for classes and times.  All are welcome.  She coordinates Recovery Radio, which airs on KRFP 90.3 FM in Moscow Thursdays at 1:05 PM. Recovery Radio needs on-air and off-air volunteers.  Call the Recovery Center  208-883-1045 or email latahrecoverycenter@gmail.com for more information.

by Nancy Casey

For this week’s exercise, you are going to need at least two pages, so as you gather your writing materials and organize your desk for your writing practice, keep that in mind.

Set one of the pages aside, and on the other, draw two long lines so that the page is divided into three columns.  In the first column, make a list of objects that you have noticed in your life.  Skip a couple of spaces after each one.  You can choose things that are right in front of you at this moment, or objects that you saw at some time in the past, as long as you can still see them clearly with your “mind’s eye.”

Be as specific as you can in naming the objects.  For instance, don’t write “furniture” if you can write “favorite chair.”  Don’t just write “clothes” when you can say “pants I got at the Goodwill on sale for a dollar.”

When you have a dozen or so items spread down the page in the first column, fill in the second column by writing down what color each of the objects is.

The third column in the tricky one.  In that column, name a different object that is the exact same color as the object written in the first column.

Imagine that you wrote “my cereal bowl” in the first column, and in the second column you recorded the fact that it is blue.  For the third column, don’t just write down the name of any old blue thing.  It must be a blue thing whose blue is the exact same blue as the cereal bowl.  You might have to look for it.

I actually found this quite difficult to do.  It took me a long time (two days!) to fill in the third column.  At first I thought it wasn’t going to be possible. Then, gradually, I started noticing or remembering other objects whose colors matched the color of the items in the first column. So if filling in the third column seems hard at first, give yourself some time, take a walk or do a chore, all the while scanning the colors of things for the “match” that you need.  Don’t give up!

When you have filled all three columns, set the page someplace where it is easy to see, and take up a new sheet.  Using what you wrote on the first page as “notes,” write a story or describe a scene with some or all of the objects in it.  Every time you mention something from your lists, show what color it is, not by naming the color, but by saying what other thing is the same color.

What you write can be completely true, completely made up, or a mixture of both. It might come out a little goofy, but it will be interesting, too.  It will be colorful without mentioning a single color!  Here’s an example of what you could write.

Be sure to write the date on your pages and to give them titles.  A title or heading for each column will help you remember what you were trying to do when you look at this page later.

Keep this exercise in mind as you go throughout your week.  Look for matching colors around you.  Keep adding to your list of things that are the same color when you get a chance.  Write another story or add to the one you started.

Are some colors harder to find than others?  Are there colors that are repeated over and over everywhere?

Nancy Casey teaches writing classes at the Recovery Center on Thursdays.  Check the calendar for classes and times.  All are welcome.  Nancy also coordinates Recovery Radio, which airs on KRFP 90.3 FM in Moscow Thursdays at 1:05 PM. Recovery Radio needs on-air and off-air volunteers.  Call the Recovery Center  208-883-1045 or email latahrecoverycenter@gmail.com for more information.