In the years since that course, I have continued used his suggestion for handling the inevitable thoughts that slip into our consciousness. He suggested we find a peaceful, favorite location to sit mentally. Wherever our personal location may be, he had us add a stream nearby. As the thoughts appeared we were to place them in the stream and allow them to float away. We were not to inspect, analyze or judge the thoughts but to simply place them in the stream. I still sit by that stream. I still place my thoughts in it. When I’m doing exceptionally well, and managing to have fewer thoughts than normal, I still enjoy the sound of the water the stream provides as a backdrop to my mantra.

For the last week or so I’ve been working on free-writing. It’s the first writing suggestion of Chapter 1 in The Longman Guide to Fiction Writing for Beginners. With this exercise, I relax and try to clear my mind before I begin. Like meditation, thoughts will inevitably appear. However in this exercise, I capture them and place them on the page one after the other. Often a word I have just written leads to a new word and I’m off in another direction. Sometimes I’m back to meditating without thoughts and I wait, listening to the babbling water next to me until I hear what’s next. To keep myself from writing full sentences and getting bogged down in the structure of the thought, I have followed Johnston’s suggestion in the book. I write vertically down the page in columns.

Once I have done this for two weeks, I’ll move on to looking over what I’ve collected. I’ll look for a recurring theme or anything of interest that jumps off the page. I’m excited to see where this takes my writing. Yes my writing, I’m writing. One page at a time, I’m creating a private writing life and learning to work around the critic so that one-day I can work with her.