The Magic of Yellow Paper

So, I decided to get out of my head and into the story. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read last week’s post to get up to speed.)

That’s always the first step in getting ourselves back in the game: showing up. And that’s what I did. I started showing up in The Lauffice every day, sitting at my computer, opening the document, and typing.

Typing what?

Lots and lots of crap.

Ugh. I thought I’d done the hard work by overcoming the tiredness and discouragement, by carving out the time in the day, by tapping out the words on my keyboard. Hadn’t I suffered enough? Hadn’t I climbed the necessary uphill to be deserving of an easy coasting downhill?

Apparently not. Because everything I was writing just felt, well, yuck. And by yuck, I mean false and paper thin and robotic. There wasn’t any life in it. Something was off. And it wasn’t the story.

Again, I felt the old finger of responsibility pointing back at me again. But not in a “you’re to blame” sort of way, but in a “something’s up with you and you better figure it out” sort of way. So, I did some soul searching. I started asking about the feelings I was having as I wrote. You know, all that airy-fairy, mindfulness mumbo-jumbo that’s flying around these days.

And for good reason. Because it works.

The mindfulness magic revealed this: I felt restricted. Scared. Intimidated. I sat at my desk typing words, but I felt like mean old Mrs. Townsley (God rest her soul) was looking over my shoulder, clicking her tongue at me the whole time. I stopped typing and looked up at my picture of Marigold sitting above my desk.

Geez, I loved that girl.

And I loved writing her story.

Why? Because it was play. Because when I wrote it, I felt like eight-year-old Maile sprawled out on her green shag bedroom carpet with a sharpened pencil and a few clean sheets of wide-ruled paper. And I wanted to get back to that feeling.

I pulled open my desk drawer and spied a pile of yellow wide-ruled paper buried at the bottom. My sister-in-law who teaches elementary had given us reams of the stuff last year when her school was purging its supply closets. I’d used it for grocery lists and excuse notes for school and chore lists for the kids. But today, that paper would be the key to my freedom.

Paper? Check.

Pen? Check.

Clipboard? Check.

I had the essentials to bust loose and run wild in the pastures of play.  

And that’s what I did. I went out to our living room sofa and nestled up to Winnie our fox red Labrador. (Our kids don’t have therapy dogs at their schools for nothing—there’s something about the calm, adoring presence of a pup that gives you courage.) Our youngest daughter was home from her half-day of kindergarten and was already steeped in her own pretend world as she sat at the coffee table playing school with her imaginary friend, Lisa. It was playtime for both of us.

And you know what?

It worked. Over the next week, I wrote through 47 pages of wide-ruled yellow notebook paper, and I couldn’t have had more fun had I been at Disney World (and I REALLY like Disney World.) Because writing had become play again.

Now, I always have a few pieces of that yellow notebook paper sitting beside my computer in case I get too rigid again, in case I start to take this all too seriously. Just seeing it out of the corner of my eye relaxes my shoulders and reminds me, “Have fun with this. Because, why not?”

Friends, how can you change your surroundings, your equipment, your mindset in order to give play the space it needs within your writing practice? Is there something new you’d like to try? Is there an old method you forgot about? It’s worth the mindfulness mumbo-jumbo to figure it out.

Time to break free…so you can keep writing.