Writing tip: Subscribe to writing journals.

I promised in an early post that I’d describe my “writing process,” how I “crawled step by step from teaching nursing to writing memoir.” Here goes.

As a nurse, I’d subscribed to several nursing journals for nearly 40 years. So, when I decided to begin writing Caring Lessons in 2000, the first thing I did was subscribe to Writer’s Digest, an easy “how-to-write” informative and inspirational journal. Since then, I’ve added subscriptions to The Writer and Poets & Writers.

How my subscriptions work for me: It seems whenever I get in a lag, one of the journals arrives in the mail. Zippo! I have an evening of reading to get me back on the runway.

Or 30 minutes of reading on the treadmill. This morning, for example, I flipped through my May 2010 The Writer and landed on this quote on p.19 by Aleksandar Hemon (The Lazarus Project): “Writing is nothing if not trying to find solutions for the problems you create for yourself.” Instantly, I saw a connection with my post of yesterday about Rhoda Janzen and her idea of writing one’s way from “captivity” to “restoration.”

Feeling compelled to write, I’m thankful for this idea-it frees me up to wander, to discover, to write my way to and through whatever the day presents.