Because I like to play

No, it's not my son. But I am a mother and I bet his mother asked him why. Only it probably sounded more like, "What the hell were you thinking?"

I don't ask this question anymore. Because I already know the answer. They weren't thinking. Nup. No thought. Child sees mud. Mud sees child. Mud climbs all over child. Child climbs all over your favorite cream colored chairs. Or something like that. 

But remember when you were so free that you never even thought about having to think through something? When mud and trees were inviting, no, begging you on bended knee to come and... oh wait... maybe that's just me.

Maybe what I am trying to say is that sometimes we forget how wide and blue the sky is from the top of a branch or what it feels like to squish wet sludge through your hands. 

For me writing is like climbing that tree. Like flying. And when it gets to feeling like my feet are too firmly on the ground, I grab some words and squish them through my fingers, just to see what will happen, just to remember what it feels like.  I close my eyes and ride that bike down the hill with no hands on the handle bars. I let go, clear my heart and let the wind speed by me. 

I. Do. Not. Think.

"Writing is magic, as much as the water of life of any other creative art. The water is free. So drink... drink and be filled." Stephen King in his book On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft.

In short...

I collect rocks because I like how they feel, I let the watermelon drip down my chin, I blow bubbles with straws and then I go write... anything, whatever I have inside me. Because something happens to my writing when I set me free.  This is art, not just punctuation marks and sentence structure. It's not all about the writing if I haven't scrapped my knee climbing trees or squished mud through my hands in quite some time. 

I play first. Then ask why later. Much later... I think they call that editing. Why is a good question and it should have an answer. Books should matter, even if it is just to the writer. They should be about something. But maybe not to start with. Maybe at first, they are just good fun?

But that's just me...

What about you? Play first? Stack the building blocks and crash em? Stomp in that mud? How do you approach your writing? What do you do when you get stuck?