writing

Writing Prompt: My Future Self Just Sent Me a Text (And It Was Rude)

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What if your future self could send you a text message right now? Would they praise you for hitting the gym… or roast you for still not returning that library book from 2009?

✍️  Writing Prompt: Your phone buzzes. It’s a message from yourself… ten years into the future. It’s not a friendly check-in—it’s a blunt, brutally honest wake-up call.

📝 Example Starter: I stared at the screen, confused. The message read, “Seriously? You’re STILL procrastinating? I thought we agreed to stop binge-watching documentaries about people who own too many cats.”

I blinked. “Is this… me? From the future? And also… what do you mean too many cats?”

Writers, the challenge is yours: Does your future self give you advice, warnings, or just sass? Do you listen… or hit block number?

Today’s Thought: What Is Your Story?

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“Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.” ~ Robert McKee

We learn the power of stories in infancy. Stories can transport us to different places, centuries, or affect our relationships. When I play around with writing fiction, I start with a couple of characters and allow them to create the story. The characters carry me along with their adventure. I’ll get lost in the writing and lose track of time. It’s a fun thing to let fictitious characters create your story. It’s a tragedy when we let others create our life’s story. We have a right to create our own story. Our personal story is ours to write. Don’t forfeit that right to another. Whatever your story take ownership. Write a great story.

Episode 54: Letter Writing as a Healing Therapy of the Journey Through Grieving

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In Episode 54 of my podcast, Journey from Grief to Healing, I share the research on the importance of writing heart-felt letters to one who died. Letter writing has a way of healing us in our grieving and simultaneously keeps us connected to the one we lost. In this episode I write to Babe and describe to her how much I miss her. 

You can listen to Episode 54 on your favorite podcasting app or click here for Episode 54.

Don’t forget to hit the subscribe button to receive notifications of future episodes.

Thinking Out Loud:

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But how could you live and have no story to tell? ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

NOTE: Most of us never think of ourselves as writers. Yet, every day we are writing (figuratively) a chapter to our story. Our stories have villains and heroes. They are filled with love, betrayal, success and loss. There are twists and turns in our stories that we can’t predict. We are writing our story and we are the central character in our story. Our central character (you and me) each day enters into a new and often unpredictable adventure. We can’t predict the events of the day, we can determine how our central character reacts to the events. It is the central character’s reaction to the events of his/her day that will color who the central character is, what is important to him/her, what he/she values, and the kind of person he or she is. Playing the leading role is powerful stuff. It’s up to us how the story turn out. We can change the direction of the central character, his/her attitude, values, and speech any time we choose to do so. Is it time to change?

“Digging” A Poem about Hard work by Seamus Heaney

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Digging

Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pin rest; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Source

A Better Life ~ What are You Creating?

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We’re all novels in progress. We’re writing a new chapter each day from sunrise to sundown. We never have writer’s block since our writing is the acting out of our lives. The people who come into our lives our among the characters in our novel. Some will appear briefly. Others will be part of the drama that unfolds as we live each day. Writers create. Since we are writing our novel with each waking moment, we can choose what we want to happen in our novel. We can create the life we want to live. We’ll have our ups and downs, we can create how we respond to each of them. We can write a great novel with our lives. 

Something to Think About

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Lots of researchers have written about being in the flow or in the zone. Great athletes find themselves in the zone where everything else is blotted out and time slows down; it’s as if they’ve move into another dimension. Getting into the flow or zone is available to all of us. I find it when I am writing or cooking a meal. Without knowing it, I slip into the zone. It’s not something I can make happen, it happens. My guess is that most people have been in the zone and not realized it was the zone. I think it happens more frequently when we’re more deeply connected with what we’re doing and not letting extraneous thoughts cloud our minds. Happy traveling through the zone.

Today’s Power Thought ~ Fill the Empty Page

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Your life is an empty page and you are the author. What story will you write?

✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Work Hard, Work Consistently

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You learn to write the same way you learn to play golf… You do it, and keep doing it until you get it right. A lot of people think something mystical happens to you, that maybe the muse kisses you on the ear. But writing isn’t divinely inspired – it’s hard work. ~ Tom Clancy

✒️ Writers’ Wisdom ~ Hold Firm to Your Gift

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“If you don’t compromise your gift, if you write each day as well as you can, and then submit your work and not worry about it and go on to the next piece, you suddenly find oddly enough that you’re no more interested in the applause than the silence. You don’t hear either one of them. You can never listen to the naysayers. If you do you won’t survive.”

~ James Lee Burke

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