7 — Letting Go of the Reins when Writing

Last autumn, I participated in Lyn Thruman’s October Writing Challenge: Writing the Wisdom of the Soul, a writing journey through the major arcana of the Tarot. On October 20 of this year, sitting in silence, I pulled the Fool Card from my OSHO Zen Tarot deck and was drawn to the begin a new loop of the journey. Here I go again.

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Prompt 8: “Sometimes, lady, you have to just take the reins and be the one in control.” Write about a time when you set your sights on something and you took control/action to make sure you came out victorious. 

October 10, 2014: Answering the Call to Adventure with Yes! is exhilarating and freeing. It is also scary. I remind myself: I’ve done this before. I experienced an A-ha! moment (I should write a book). I followed a trail of synchronicities and joined a writers’ circle. I wrote, hundreds of words per day, for nine months. I submitted query letters. I received rejections. I self-published. I became, I am, a published author.

November 7, 2015: I read the prompt for today, and added, “and sometimes, you have to let go.” At the moment, this is poignantly true for me with respect to my writing.

I started NaNoWriMo with a bang. The words were flowing and I was writing more per day than ever before. Yesterday, inspiration came to a screeching, whip-lash-inducing halt. I was devastated. I made myself do sprints with @NaNoWordSprints, which had been an amazing tool in previous days. I wrote, producing utterly uninspired (and uninspiring) sentences. I quit. For me, there is no point in writing unusable paragraphs.

Dreaming with Horse Spirit

My Word Count horse did not respond to my lead, no matter how I spurred it. Worse, I was so entrenched in controlling productivity, that I had choked my Creativity streak.

I am dropping the reins. I am releasing the perverse need to meet my self-imposed daily word count goals. I am setting my creative spirit free. (Do with me what you will, !!! — I just realized that she has a name. Off to listen. Off to learn it. Off to merge with her in friendly partnership.)

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Writing Prompt from Lyn Thurman. You can receive the full prompts from Writing the Wisdom of the Soul.

Images are from the Osho Zen Tarot, an amazing, consciousness-expanding deck.

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