Pull feeling; from belly to page
~ the non-surgical word-echtomy called writing
Today, tomorrow and the day after, attending the When Words Collide writers’ conference in Calgary … my stay-cation weekend of no work, just play, begins today. Life depends on writing, and writing depends on lived-life; otherwise, writers would have to make up everything. I’ll be hanging out with more than 850 writers and wannabe writers – I’m attending 19 sessions, the opening, the closing, and the 17 I’m emceeing ~ a lot of talking and a lot of listening. I’ve found I meet interesting people there.
Writers are never just writing.
Even when our hands are still, the mind is in motion, gathering raw material from life while the belly turns and churns experiences and feelings into syllables and serious silly …
Every conversation, every misheard word, every moment of stillness; all of it waits in the wings until the page calls it forward. Writing is not an escape from living; it’s a deeper immersion.
To write is to listen, not only to words but to the spaces between them.
This weekend, I’ll be surrounded by hundreds of writers at a conference, yet the real writing will happen later; that’s the takeaway, the meat of the meet and greet when these collisions of thought have settled into genre baskets.
Life fills the notebook long before pen meets paper. We draw from people we know, those we’ve just met, and even those we only imagine. Without that lived-life, we would have nothing, and time away from the writer’s desk is never wasted, never idle.
The temptation, especially in the company of other writers, is to believe the craft is shaped mostly in workshops or over coffee with like-minded souls. But writing grows in the quiet accumulation of moments that feel too small to matter. Until they do.
I sometimes wonder if writing is less about the act of creating and more about learning to notice.
To notice how people lean forward when they care.
To notice how the light falls across a table at the end of the day.
To notice how one phrase, casually spoken, can unlock a memory you lost …
Living this way means you carry a pen in your head, even if you’ve left it on the kitchen counter. And reading what is written is a mirror to that noticing. It trains you to see patterns, to recognize music in language, and to feel the weight of each sentence.
I’ve met people who insist you must write every day, no matter what. I’ve met others who believe you should wait until you have something urgent to say. I think both are missing the point. It’s not the frequency, it’s the depth of attention you bring when you do sit down to write.
The conference will end, the notes will pile up, and the real work will begin, turning something into clarity.
Writing begins long before you write, and it keeps going long after you stop.
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