A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-Four-Hundred-And-Sixty-Three

I am in the beginning of working on some writing exercises for a poetry workshop that I want to do in January.  It's going to be a generative workshop, with a focus on some fairly straightforward writing exercises that are designed to be simple and reusable.  For me, a lot of the time I find that when I look into writing exercises, what I find are just prompts, which can help, but are often not very easy to repeat.  I'm thinking about playful things that one can do without even needing to think about what you want to write, but instead focus on simply playing around with language itself in ways that have helped me to get going when I am stuck.  I want it to be fun and accessible, while still providing something truly valuable.  To me, play is often an essential ingredient in the process, even, maybe especially, when the work is most serious in its intent.  That spark of playfulness is often what lets me, and I would expect other writers, explore and discover, pushes me into new spaces to think about things in different ways that had never occurred before, and to do so without a sense of self-judgement, and if I can help to offer some tools to writers that let them connect with that energy, that would be very special to me.  I do feel like a generative workshop of this sort is also something that very much suits me in numerous ways.  The most obvious, I would say, is that I am always writing, and that requires finding strategies for getting started.  Even tonight, I had a lot of hesitancy before I got to work.  I was procrastinating, just sitting around and doing nothing of value, but, even as much as I might have felt like slacking off, I knew that once I got started, I'd be able to do the work.

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