Be Specific

Lesson Learned & Shared

This year I am taking on the #100dayproject by sharing one lesson a day from my Stop Writing Alone journey. I am looking specifically for the lessons I not only learned myself, but the ones I find myself repeating to writers and creatives in my community over and over again.

Be Specific

Oh thank you Natalie Goldberg for your Writing Practice, WRITING DOWN THE BONES and all the lessons within. This particular one, the drive toward specificity, is one that serves me and my writing every single time I show up to the page. When we write we need to
Be specific. Don't write "tree," write "Sycamore." Don't write "car," write "Cadillac."
It's simple advice, but it is advice I need to be reminded of. Even when working with Natalie Goldberg during one of her retreats I remember complaining saying, "Oh! I forgot to be specific in this piece. I don't know why I keep doing that!" And she said that was fine, because simple knowing it was missing was already doing the work. Which it ends up is also very true because writing is rewriting, so if you don't remember the specifics in your drafts, you can carry this lesson into your revision to pack just as powerful a punch!
It will bring your written worlds to life.
Do you also see the hidden lesson here? While you walk in this world, pay attention to the specifics. Learn names, see details, PAY ATTENTION. You need all of that information for the next time you are writing!
Do you already have a specialized knowledge in a certain category that you would not need to research to find specific names of things if you were writing about them? Let us know in the comments!

My #100DayProject for 2024

Introducing my #100dayproject for 2024:

To know me is to know I have a teacher soul. At the end of the day, my passion is learning and sharing that learning with anyone willing to listen. So, when it came time to think of a project that I could realistically take on for 100 days straight, it had to come back to that passion.

For the next 100 days, I will share one lesson learned each day that I find myself continually sharing with writers and creatives in my community. There are plenty of things that come up again and again (in fact, I'm kind of betting that there are at least 100 of them!) and it's about time I wrote them all down somewhere. Let's see how far we get with these mini lessons, let's see how many you remember me chanting before, and how many you needed to be reminded of!