Welcome to week 2: Cultivate!
Last week, in Plant Seeds, you created your goal, your routine, and the seeds of your writing practice. Now it’s time to put it all together and make it grow.
There’s a lot of excitement at the beginning of a new project. We have new energy, we can see where we want to go, and we dive in. It’s like spring after a long winter, when finally it’s warm enough to fill up the greenhouse with seedlings, when the smell of soil and mud replaces the cold snow. The sun is shining, the sky is clear, and everything feels possible. You’re going to get the garden planted early this year! Words will flow out seamlessly, appearing on the page even better than they sound in your head!
And then the spring rains set in. That mud that once was the harbinger of a warmer season is now rutting up the roads to make them near impassible. Those paragraphs of perfect sentences come out splintered, stubbornly refusing to make sense.
Beginnings are sneaky like this, giving us the energy to start something without any regard to the unseen potholes up ahead.
I don’t mean to scare you here—I just mean to tell you right now that there will be potholes. There will be rutted roads and days that mud threatens to stall all your forward motion.
Keep writing.
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