Ease Lessons for Writers
In your writing life, no matter how hard you work or how well you plan, things won't always unfold the way you'd hoped. In Ease Lessons for Writers, we explore what gets in the way of our writing, why that happens, and why it matters. Together we learn how to make our writing easier and more joyful. I'm your host, Monna McDiarmid, a writer and coach based in Japan and Nova Scotia. Website: monnamcdiarmid.com/ | Newsletter: monnamcdiarmid.com/subscribe/ | Instagram: @monnamcdiarmidwrites/ | Patreon: @MonnaMcDiarmid
Ease Lessons for Writers
27. Elizabeth (Season 3, Episode 3/3)
TODAY'S GUEST: ELIZABETH
Today's episode is my second with Elizabeth who is in the process of becoming. She currently does laundry, dishes, drives carpools, and fills remaining “confetti time" with reading, writing, playing piano, thinking, and staring at a screensaver of a vine-covered tree. Along with her husband, she cares for two human children and an elderly pug in Richmond, Virginia, USA. Prior to this all-consuming undertaking, she worked as a writer and professional naming consultant for 20+ years on more than 150 product and corporate naming projects. In 2010, she published Finding Thalhimers (Dementi Milestone Publishing) about her father’s family and their department store, which existed for 150 years. Elizabeth loves breakfast, expensive dark chocolate, unapologetic authenticity, and laughing really hard.
Thanks for this conversation, Elizabeth.
HOMEWORK INVITATIONS FROM LAST EPISODE
1. Writing while Parenting
- Create a time box (two to three hours) for your writing.
- Decide how many days a week you would like to write and choose whether you will track your writing through time or words.
- Track your writing between now and our next conversation with the knowledge that you get to rejig your plan going forward.
- Remember you are going to write this novel one draft (or pass) at a time.
2. Blasphemy
Create a permission slip for yourself to write the most blasphemous things.
3. Parenting (from Elizabeth)
What are you parenting?
What are you parenting?
by Monna McDiarmid
1. A jade plant.
Okay. Things went badly.
2. Poems and stories.
No longer babies, I send them
off to school and work.
3. The dream of a dog
I’ve not yet met.
A golden retriever,
I call him Sam.
4. The white space
around the margins
of my too full life.
It tells me about FOMO.
I urge it to stay home.
5. Hope.
I coax it out
of the shadows
and hold it close.
Stick with me, kid.
I can’t do this without you
*****
ABOUT EASE LESSONS:
Music: “Meekness” by Kai Engel, used under Creative Commons Attribution license
Editor: Damien Pitter
Host: Monna McDiarmid (pronounced Mona McDermid) | Coach, Writer and Counselor
Website: MonnaMcDiarmid.com
Newsletter: The Sunday Reader
Patreon: where I share monthly excerpts from my writing memoir in progress
Instagram: @monnamcdiarmid
