Seasons, senses & self
Life. You’re born. You learn stuff. Loving, crawling, walking, talking. Climbing, skipping, catching, counting, turn-taking. Reading, writing, adding and subtracting friends. Surviving testing times, success and failure; thriving. New school, new hormones, new height, new shape. Negotiating peer groups, private languages, taking risks; cognitive explosion. Learning to be an adult, experimenting, trying to become yourself. Grand vistas open up – you start climbing – sudden fall. The lone hero finds they need supportive networks. New beginnings, wider horizons, deeper friendships, disappointments. Am I going round in circles? I pause to take stock. I take a detour. Find new goals. Re-evaluate worth. Content?
Seasons, senses & self 20/365:
Nudging you to... write? reflect? walk? notice? flow?
Rashly, I have set myself a new challenge today. I will try to write a 10,000 word patchwork memoir in 100 days – one hundred reminiscences or reconstructions of my life, in 100-word daily episodes. And share them daily, not on this blog, but with ReadWriteFlow members. Perhaps some other members will try to do something similar in tandem with me.
I had some success with a similar challenge in 2021, using the 1+2+3… sentence-pattern as above for a 10,000-word work of fiction (a kind of ‘novella-in-flash’ I suppose). Each morning, I scribbled a 100-word episode in my notebook in the form of a diary entry by one of the characters. I set myself a time limit of 15 minutes a day (a way of silencing my inner critic) and had no intention of typing it up, revising it or sharing it, let alone trying to get it published. It was simply an exercise (a game if you like) to practise the form and instil a discipline of building up a piece of writing on a daily basis.
I kept it up for 63 days. After that, I put it aside to finish A Place to Keep My Shadow, as a deadline was approaching. I never went back to my novella-in-flash, but I really enjoyed doing it for those nine weeks, and benefited from the discipline.
Read more on Seasons, senses & self:The plan
Other posts in the series
Author's intro to the series
Contact the author (Chris Fewings)