My Own Personal Writing Lab
Finding Creativity in Experimentation and Play
Recently, I decided to go all in with my writing. I’ve been writing and journaling for years and it has helped me grow and learn about myself in so many ways…as a creative, as a person, as a noticer, and even as a mother. But now I’ve come to a time in my life that I have space and desire to truly expand and develop my writing in ways that I can’t even imagine. It feels kind of exciting, right?! Knowing that you want to take the next step, but not knowing where it will lead you?! After a lot of thought, I crafted an intention that will help infuse my writing practice with curiosity and dedication for the next several months. I decided to use this next year as a time of devotion, practice, and experimentation.
Devotion:: showing up every day to be a writer.
Practice:: to practice the craft and art of writing in a more intentional and expansive way.
Experimentation:: to have fun exploring new ways to step into the flow, inspire my writing, and to stretch a bit further past what is comfortable to me.
Over the years, I’ve done morning pages, written a lot of poetry, created a blog that was centered around homeschooling and play, and shared my thoughts and photos about motherhood on Instagram. But once I had found what came naturally to me, what felt comfortable, I set up camp and never really stepped outside to see what else I could create. I’ve had lots of ideas, a few stops and starts, but lately I’ve found myself wanting to finally try those ideas that I’ve never got around to playing with. I thought about my morning writing practice and imagined how I could shift it in ways that would bring this intention to life.
Several weeks ago, I found an email in my inbox reminding me that my favorite summer-long Journal Jam was coming again this year. My friend Amy has been doing these workshops/labs for years and I always get so much inspiration from them. Instantly, I got a vision. Of a Writing Lab in my own backyard, so to speak. Not only would I participate in Journal Jam, but I decided that I would also begin putting together my own creative enclave of sorts, in the form of my own, personal Writing Lab to explore this summer.
I always loved the idea of creating in lab. In a lab you experiment, try new things, and see what happens. Why not apply that to writing? I began imagining ways to combine elements of art, books, words, photos, prompts, and more so that I could experiment and see what works together and what doesn’t. Magnetic letters, stamps, pages copied out of books to cut apart and rework, a card catalog filled photos, images cut out of magazines, index cards with different forms of poetry that I could select on a whim. I saw myself mixing these elements and seeing where they would lead me. Could I try new forms of poetry and different styles of writing I’ve never attempted before? What would they inspire? What could I create if I dropped all the shoulds, all the boxes and checklists, and instead dabbled in writing alchemy? What magic could I tap into when I stepped outside of what was comfortable and known, and into the yet-to-be-discovered?
In a lab, you’re free to try it your way, to make mistakes, to get wrong answers, or even just gather snippets of illumination that you can then begin with again to make something even more unique and different. When you’re experimenting, you seek out research, try what has worked for others, pour over resources and supplies that might aid in your investigation and then take it a step further and find your own path. You document your findings, keep a record of what you discovered, produced, pulled apart, and remade.
I took this vision, along with my writing intention, and began gathering what I would need to turn my small writing room into a lab. Not only did I gather physical items and ideas, but I also populated this conception with how I wish to feel as I begin to play with writing in new ways. I hope this creative journey will not only be a lot of fun, but it will also be filled with voracious curiosity. I hope it will help instill more trust in myself as a writer, more confidence in my voice and creativity. I want to see if I can begin to create without so much hesitation, but instead with an air of wonder. I want to keep playing with the magic of creation and see what happens when I let go of what is easy and into what is possible.
Stay tuned! I hope to share pieces of my work and document some of my findings along the way!
