The HEA Cafe

I bought a book, Pencil Dancing; new ways to free your creative spirit, by Mari Messer. It’s the kind of book that makes me want to page through it while I sit under a shady tree and drink coffee.
Partly, it’s the size—a little wider than a normal book yet not large enough to think ‘homework.’ It’s more reminiscent of an old-fashioned schoolroom scribbler and seems to promise all sorts of secrets. There are little drawing in the book that invite flights of imagination. The format is appealing—lots of wide margins, which suggest the reader might like to make notes and comments. And throughout, in the margins, are quotes like this one, “The process has an intelligence that can be trusted, and the gift of creation is the ability to work with it,” by Shaun McNiff. From a book Trust the Process. Now I know nothing of Shaun M or his book but I like the idea of trusting the process. It’s something I am learning to do.
     Then there are the headings and chapter titles in a cursive font. “Befriending Your Beasts”, “Creating From the Inside Out”, “Dancing With You Creative Spirit.”
     It’s the sort of book that calls to the creative spirit like a whisper, a beckoning finger, promising to share secrets.
     I love the concept of pencil dancing. I dream of the day my pencil will dance over the page, leaving in its wake a stupendous story. Unfortunately I haven’t found it works that way. Instead, I have to work at my stories. Only as I whine and moan and complain does the story come out. Or maybe the whining is only a diversion. Maybe it’s sitting down and dwelling on the whole idea, arranging and rearranging elements until they click that gets the story figured out. Yet I somehow keep wishing for the dancing pencil.
     Maybe I’ll find some golden nugget in this book that will help me.
All I need is some time to dive into the book though it is perhaps the sort of book to be nibbled at and digested slowly. I’m sure it’s the latter, which is a good thing because that’s the only way I’ll be able to get at it.