What an interesting idea, Yehudit! I’ve never heard anyone suggest this before but I can see how helpful it would be. I think I need to go round up some images for myself…

Thanks for your kind words, Mia!

Good point about having a strong visual image to maintain your focus. Thanks for sharing, Michael!

I definitely agree with you that you have to be totally in the present moment to be effective as a writer. So many people don’t live for today. They are completely consumed with the future, and yet it is how we live today that creates our future. It is what we feel today that matters, because it is the only thing the determines your future. Feeling the importance of the message you’re about to write… is critical to the reader’s positive response to your prose. That’s the visual image I use to maintain my focus. It works!

You make a good point, Lena, about the need for our writing to be INTERESTING, even to ourselves, as the writer(s). In my experience, if the writer is bored when writing, the reader will surely be bored when reading.

Good luck, Susan. Let us know how it went!

In the former case, it makes sense to pause and think whether it makes sense to write it at all (with 1.4 millions books published every year, this is something worth contemplating in any event) — or perhaps more thinking and research or something is needed before this is worth writing about.

In the latter case — a repressed feeling and emotion — it can actually concern the piece I am writing directly; that is, it emerges in connection with what I am writing. In that case, my best strategy is to get directly to that feeling and just _feel_ it (it works best if I can find it in my body). Maybe it’s something worth channeling into writing — or maybe it is just something that has to be felt through before the writing can go on.