TheWritersBag.com

Congratulations to those of you who qualified to receive my three e-manuals as a prize for having participated in 10 Word Shots!

Here’s this week’s photo:

You could take this one in any number of directions. Look at it. Think about it. Where will you go with it? Remember, you can submit a phrase, a paragraph, an entire story or just a word. It’s up to you.

When you’re ready to participate in this Word Shot, simply submit your commentary on the photo as a comment to this post. And don’t forget to check out others’ submissions for this Word Shot in the coming week. Please remember, this exercise is for all of us, and the purpose is to help up hone our writing skills.

Also, let me know when you have participated in 10 Word Shots by e-mailing me. I send you, via e-mail, all three of my e-manuals.

By the way, if you haven’t taken the time to read the entries for last week’s Word Shot, please do. Several were very nice. Thank you all for participating, and I hope you take another crack at today’s Word Shot.

Good luck and write something remarkable for this one!

Creativity demands experimentation.

But many of us are afraid to experiment. In school we learned that experimentation is dangerous. Most test questions had only one right answer. Even with essay questions, we had to provide the specific information the teachers wanted to read. Experimentation would have gotten us flunked.

If you want to become the best writer you can be, you have to be willing to take the risk of experimentation. Will you fall on your face? Sure you will. Possible several times. But if you stay with it and faithfully pay attention to the whisperings of the muse within you, you will eventually write what only you can write in the way only you can write it. Then you will be a true writer.

Don’t be afraid to fail. In any creative pursuit, failure is the price of eventual greatness. You are not a student in a post-graduate school, where they boot you out if you fail one class or one test. Nor are you an airline pilot or brain surgeon. For them, experimentation and failure can be fatal. You are a writer. For you, the fear of experimentation and failure is fatal.

Think of other people in creative fields, such as inventors. Thomas Edison failed 1800 times in his attempt to invent the light bulb. One success at the end of so many failures brought lasting fame to him and light to the world.

My son was a sponsored snowboarder. One day, when I told him to be careful and avoid falls, he said, “Dad, if I’m not falling, I’m not progressing.”

Novelist James Joyce wrote, “A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.”

Push yourself. Experiment. Fail and try again. Explore new territory in your writing. From where you are now, you can’t know where your commitment to fearlessly push your writing forward will take you. But you can be sure it will be well worth the trip.

PS. In my last post, I invited all of you to share an excerpt from your journal with the rest of us. Come on – don’t be shy!

I’ve climbed up on the soapbox more than once about the value of keeping a personal journal – especially for those who are interested in writing. Whether you write by hand in a paper notebook or enter your daily entries in your computer, journaling is one of the best things you will ever do for yourself.

So, I want to know if you are taking advantage of this high-return, no-risk, low-cost self-investment opportunity. In fact, not only do I want to hear whether or not you keep a  journal, but I want you to do something daring: I want you to submit, in a comment, an excerpt from one of your journal entries.

The excerpt can be short or long. It can be from yesterday’s entry or from a dusty diary decades old. It can be deeply personal or not.

This is your chance to expose yourself in the way writers love to expose themselves: with words that reveal their minds, hearts and souls … or just their day-to-day activities.

So please, take my challenge.

In case you’re thinking that I should lead the way with something of my own, I offer the following, taken from a journal entry I made late at night after my daughter’s wedding.

March 13, 2003: Little Jenny got married today. It’s 11pm and we’ve been up since about 3am. I tried and succeeded in not getting emotional through the wedding ceremony and then the program at the wedding dinner, where I conducted and had to talk about her life. I did okay until the very end. But then Jenny came running back into the room a few minutes after leaving with Tom with tears in her eyes to tell me how much she loved me. I couldn’t help crying and Jenny’ friends all crowded around and hugged me. How I love that little angel. She needs so much care and love. God, please take care of her. Tonight I cried. For all that was. For all that will never be again.

Using that excerpt was not easy for me. It was very personal – way beyond my typical limits – but I hope that if I do it, you will feel comfortable revealing a personal journal entry of your own.

Please share.