Have felt ideas stewing in recent days; more than that, the certain brand of energy needed and driving me to write. What? A story! Not my forte as far as I can tell. Am cursed with need to minimize, to contract text. Distill. Good instinct for most editorial work, but not so much for the weaving of literary yarns that might actually entertain someone. Give me your joke and I will return it to you a third its size with a keyword list attached, and happily present you with the resulting lint screen. Alas. Also hard to move in the direction of fiction, which has been a near stranger for about, oh, the last decade; not enough urgency for it ever in a life focused on Deliverables. So why any effort now, why these calisthenics and always having the laptop along “just in case”? Okay, I want to take this writing class that one has to apply to for admission; appealing in its competitiveness and star quality (it’s taught by someone you’ve heard of, whose prose stylings energize and inspire me). Wish me luck.

So anyway, yeah — subject, topic, fodder. I know many of you dear readers are enjoying the quiet before next month’s NaNoWriMo storm. How to find that urgency, my fellow writers? Found an answer today, maybe, from Anne Lamott. See if it works for you.

I used to tell my writing students to write the story that they wish they could come upon, that they wished existed in the world: because if they wrote the story and gave it away, it would exist. When they read something that made something stir inside them way down deep, they must take note, because this was a life-giving story. Life, inside them, was tugging on their sleeves, trying to get their attention.