Good on Paper

Courtesy of the Southeast Review’s Writing Regimen, a writing exercise for you to enjoy:

Someone once said that food is memory– Write about a meal, being concrete and sensuous about the food and the environment around it, that has become irreversibly tied to a memory.

Currently buried under: piles of student papers

Item # 1 on my priority list today: write. This meant that I planned to work on my novel before anything else. No blog writing, no freelance writing, no answering emails until I visited my characters after an unfortunate week away from them. But by 9:30 a.m., there I was writing an email when my cat, Imposter, dropped a live bird at my feet. That quickly I was off track. How can a girl plan to write when she has to catch a bird, clean up feathers, and try to ignore the fact that she hasn’t heard back from the only job interview she’s had in months?

 The good news, I guess, is that this was our first “gift” from Imposter, a skittish stray cat we’ve adopted. Rudy Huxtable, our other kitty, has been bringing us gifts for years. Usually, though, they’re already dead. I was so saddened by this little bird who was too wounded to fly away, but my immediate thought was: I have to write about this. This is what writers do…they turn all the crazy, surreal, funny, and horrifying moments into fuel for their writing.

Take for instance, my good friend Editrix. Last night her tire blew while on her way to buy hot dogs and we stood together in a gas station parking lot trying to learn how to change a tire. She went home and wrote about it. It’s the best coping strategy I know. For every day in which life gets in the way of writing, there are days like today when the writing wouldn’t happen if it weren’t for life’s little adventures.

I’ll let you know if Imposter and the bird make it into my next story.