“If you take one step toward God, God takes a thousand steps toward you.   –Ancient proverb

 If you think about that proverb, it sounds a lot like dancing with a gorilla, doesn’t it? It’s time to get back to the basics and go to the page without knowing what will happen. But that one step toward your creative spirit, your creative identity, your creative work, can be the hardest step to take. Sometimes it feels like your ankles are tied together.

Going back to some of the earliest posts in this blog: motion begets motion, writing begets writing, stepping begets dancing.

Be vulnerable. Go to the page not knowing where you’ll find yourself, not knowing what will be hiding there waiting for you to discover it. The gorilla is waiting for you. You don’t wait for the gorilla.

Exercise: Write a scene where your character is vulnerable to his or her environment. An example would be a boy alone in a boat in the middle of a lake, and he can’t swim.

Reading Suggestion: Stephen King wrote a terrific book based on this notion: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (Scribner, 1999).