Today’s exercise is to go for a walk for ten minutes. If you cannot do this, find a window and look outside for ten. Do not write anything down. Just look, observe, and see what comes up in you.
After the ten minutes have passed, pull out your journal and free write for ten to 20 minutes about the experience. What did you see? Describe your surroundings in detail. Describe everything that happened. Did you get any ideas? What is your relationship to this place? How does this place make you feel?
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I had more trouble than I thought with taking a walk, especially with consecutive days of rain and heavy rain. Therefore, I will use my first solo kayak trip from 3 days ago.
I usually get my best ideas while mowing. I just start thinking about something, then fire up the mower and let the ideas wash over me like fresh grass clippings on the lawn. (Except that I use a grass catcher and the image of taking a shower of fresh grass clippings makes me itch. But I digress.) I like to call it Zen Mowing.
A couple years ago, I had just finished the school year and was faced with a 5-day deadline to submit a one-act play, my first attempt at writing for the stage. I had the general idea to tease out a thought that I had long ago after learning about my youngest daughter, Kath, being diagnosed as having cerebral palsy from an in utero stroke. (A doctor nixed that idea a few years ago. It was brain malformations that caused the CP, but not a stroke. But the thought was still there.) What if James Redfield was correct in his Celestine Prophecy books with the thought that we begin as disembodied souls seeking to perfect ourselves through multiple lifetimes and we choose our parents as the people who will help get us to perfect ourselves? And what if that disembodied soul could choose to take on a health condition, like a stroke, that was otherwise destined for one of their parents? And what if Kath’s stroke was actually destined for me? I started wondering if I was acting as grateful toward her as I should for someone who may have saved my life.
So that was the initial idea that I knew I wanted to develop. Fire up the mower, there’s only days to go.
What came out of that was 3 days of writing a play called “The Waiting Room.” In it, the middle-aged actor was waiting an indeterminate amount of time in a medical waiting room before a female doctor comes to see him. Through their conversation, he comes to find out that he is dead and that his doctor is actually a grown-up version of his disabled daughter.
That was not the original idea, but the mowing led to another path that led me to The Waiting Room.
It’s time for a new one act play now. I had a 30-minute spurt of writing the play, entitled “The Audition,” and dozens of lawn days. Unfortunately, the mowing is not doing it any longer. But in my recent kayak ride, I was only a little way out on the lake before I realized a resolution for my story. I had the first two parts of the one-act (I always make my stories 3 “acts” regardless of the length) outlined, but not how to end it. Then it hit me to add a new character and make it a metaplay, or a play within a play. I don’t know how it will work out but the lake ride gave me at least a resolution that had escaped me.
Now it’s time to write. The deadline awaits.
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