Know all those jocks who mocked you way back when cuz you were busy writing instead of playing sports?
Well, guess what, fellow scribes? We’re much more like our braggadocio-filled brethren than they – and we – ever thought:
by Srinivas Rao
When people exercise they stretch. When basketball players warm up the shoot free throws and shots from other areas on the court. Runners might do a slow short distance run to warm up. Tennis players hit a few tennis balls.
Writers have to warm up too. We warm up by putting our pen on a page and fingers on the keyboard and tap, tap, tap. It doesn’t really matter if anything particularly coherent shows up. We just need to get our fingers in motion. We need our fingers to loosen up. After all, painting vivid pictures that engrave deeper memories by tapping away at a keyboard is not exactly a natural state. But it is what writers do.
As we do, ideas start to bake, thoughts start to percolate, and subjects start to announce themselves saying “write about me.” And a montage of chocolate cakes, sunset kisses, perfect waves, and certain moments that are destined to be put into words starts to play in our mind. We might find a word, a phrase or a full sentence to describe those moments. If it sounds right, words make their way onto the page. If it sounds wrong we stare blankly off into space or at our screen, in the life of a writer known as “thinking.”
Perhaps we’ll find the words, the sentence or the paragraph to paint this picture that captures and leads the imagination of the reader. We want more than anything to take them to that place with us, so they can live it, breathe it, feel it….